To each her own sensibility, it is difficult to ascertain whether Ishiguro is trying to recommend Stevens’s approach to the dignity of his own station in The Remains of the Day. Without revealing too much plot (and since I read this a long time ago and am lazy to re-explain it), we can see alternately that Stevens both appreciates a lot of contentment and regret with his own work.
When I first read this book, Ishita and I had a long conversation about whether dignity is a virtue we should strive for. I live my life in a pretty undignified way, and she argued (as Ishiguro also appears to argue by Stevens’ appreciation and deference to Lord Darlington who ends up being a Nazi sympathizer) that eventually, a striving toward dignity without integrity wielding the direction of the scalar, is ill-begotten from the start.
But a Nazi is a Nazi. Ishiguro is a British author, and one is not asked to wonder on the moral position he has about serving a Nazi. What about lost love? This is more controversial.
Toward the end of the novel, Stevens ruminates regarding Miss Kenton:
Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
What of this love lost to time? Lost to his irreproachable dignity – it was not proper for a butler to have intimate relations with a housemaid. What of regret, which is as futile as it is inevitable to a man like Stevens? What does Ishiguro recommend for this?
Stevens considers this at the end of the novel: how to enjoy what remains of the day when by his own admission while saying goodbye to Miss Kenton…
Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
Precisely, Stevens. And so what? I asked my dad why he doesn’t retire. I wheedled their finances out of them, and I know that they are ready. Why not, at the end of a long life’s work, finally put up his feet and enjoy the evening? He doesn’t give me a straight answer, but we can imagine what drives men to their grave, working all the way. It is a dignity afforded them by years of putting us through school, buying us clothes, glasses, takeout food. I wish he could rest, but he and I both know that if he did, there would be too much time to think about what remains of the day, and we cannot bear this, nevermind the dignity inherent even in heartbreak. What I wish I could say to him, but can’t form in Korean: What is a heart if not that faulty vessel designed from the start to contain something immeasurably large, which is flowing, shifting constantly, and whose volume is commensurate to all the oceans on this planet earth?