Arts Studies and Criticism

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day centres on memory as its governing narrative principle, offering a sustained exploration of the inward life and the late formation of subjectivity. Through the butler Stevens’s recollections during his journey — marked by rupture, omission, and self-deception — the novel stages an inward scrutiny of identity and a belated attempt at self-reconstruction. In doing so, it reconfigures “travel” from geographical movement into an internal voyage across temporal and affective dimensions, thereby unsettling the conventional narrative paradigm of travel writing. At the same time, by aligning Stevens’s personal trajectory with the rise and decline of Darlington Hall, the text functions as an allegory of Britain’s postwar cultural identity crisis amid imperial decline and the demands of historical reckoning. The novel ultimately achieves an organic convergence between aesthetic form and political insight.