34 The Unreliable Narrator David Lodge

34 The Unreliable Narrator
Based on KAZUO ISHIGURO’s The Remains of the Day (1989)
UNRELIABLE NARRATORS are invariably invented characters who are part of the stories
they tell. An unreliable "omniscient" narrator is almost a contradiction in terms, and
could only occur in a very deviant, experimental text. Even a character-narrator cannot
be a hundred per cent unreliable. If everything he or she says is palpably false, that only
tells us what we know already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be
some possibility of discriminating between truth and falsehood within the imagined world
of the novel, as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest.
The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an interesting
way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how human beings distort or
conceal the latter. This need not be a conscious, or mischievous, intention on their
part. The narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel is not an evil man, but his life has been
based on the suppression and evasion of the truth, about himself and about others. His
narrative is a kind of confession, but it is riddled with devious self-justification and special
pleading, and only at the very end does he arrive at an understanding of himself - too
late to profit by it.
The frame-story is set in 1956. The narrator is Stevens, the ageing butler of an
English stately home, once the seat of Lord Darlington, now the property of a rich
American. Encouraged by his new employer, Stevens takes a short holiday in the West
Country. His private motive is to make contact with Miss Kenton, housekeeper at
Darlington Hall in its great days between the Wars, when Lord Darlington hosted unofficial
gatherings of high-ranking politicians to discuss the crisis in Europe. Stevens hopes to
persuade Miss Kenton (he continues to refer to her thus, though she is married) to
come out of retirement and help solve a staffing crisis at Darlington Hall. As he travels,
he recalls the past.
Stevens speaks, or writes, in a fussily precise, stiffly formal style - butlerspeak, in
a word. Viewed objectively, the style has no literary merit whatsoever. It is completely
lacking in wit, sensuousness and originality. Its effectiveness as a medium for this novel
resides precisely in our growing perception of its inadequacy for what it describes.
Gradually we infer that Lord Darlington was a bungling amateur diplomat who believed
in appeasing Hitler and gave support to fascism and antisemitism. Stevens has never
admitted to himself or to others that his employer was totally discredited by subsequent
historical events, and takes pride in the impeccable service he rendered his weak and
unamiable master The same mystique of the perfect servant rendered him incapable of
recognizing and responding to the love that Miss Kenton was ready to offer him when
they worked together. But a dim, heavily censored memory of his treatment of her
gradually surfaces in the course of his narrative - and we realize that his real motive for
seeking her out again is a vain hope of undoing the past. Stevens repeatedly gives a
favourable account of himself which turns out to be flawed or deceptive. Having
delivered to Miss Kenton a letter reporting the death of her aunt, he realizes that he has
not "actually" offered his condolences. His hesitation about whether to return almost
distracts us from his extraordinarily crass omission of any expression of regret in the
preceding dialogue. His anxiety not to intrude on her grief seems to bespeak a
sensitive personality, but in fact as soon as he finds another "opportunity to express my
sympathy", he does no such thing, but instead rather spitefully criticises her supervision
of two new maidservants. Typically, he has no word more expressive than "strange" for
the feeling he experiences at the thought that Miss Kenton might be crying on the
other side of the door. We may be surprised that he should suspect her of doing so, just
after noting with approval her calm reception of the news. In fact many pages later he
admits that he has attached this memory to the wrong episode:
I am not at all certain now as to the actual circumstances which had led me to be
standing thus in the back corridor. It occurs to me that elsewhere in attempting to gather
such recollections, I may well have asserted that this memory derived from the minutes
immediately after Miss Kenton's receiving news of her aunt's death . . . But now, having
thought further, I believe I may have been a little confused about this matter; that in fact
this fragment of memory derives from events that took place on an evening at least a few
months after the death of Miss Kenton's aunt . . .
It was an evening, in fact, when he humiliated her by coldly rejecting her timid but
unambiguous offer of love - that was why she was crying behind the closed door. But
Stevens characteristically associates the occasion not with this private, intimate episode, but
with one of Lord Darlington's most momentous conferences. The themes of political bad
faith and emotional sterility are subtly interwoven in the sad story of Stevens's wasted
life.
It is interesting to compare and contrast Ishiguro's novel with another virtuoso

feat in the use of an unreliable narrator - Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. This novel takes
the unusual form of a long poem by a fictitious American poet called John Shade, with
a detailed commentary upon it by an émigré European scholar, Shade's neighbour, called
Charles Kinbote. The poem is an autobiographical work centering on the tragic suicide of
the poet's daughter. Shade himself, we gather, had just been murdered when the
manuscript of the poem came into Kinbote's hands. We soon realize that Kinbote is
mad, believing himself to be the exiled king of some Ruritanian country resembling pre-
Revolutionary Russia. He has convinced himself that Shade was writing a poem about his
own history, and that he was shot in error by an assassin sent to murder Kinbote
himself. The purpose of his commentary is to establish Kinbote's bizarre interpretation
of the facts. One of the pleasures of reading it is to discern, by reference to the
"reliable" narrative of Shade's poem, the degree of Kinbote's self-delusion. Compared
with The Remains of the Day, Pale Fire is exuberantly comic at the expense of the
unreliable narrator. Yet the effect is not totally reductive. Kinbote's evocation of his
beloved kingdom, Zembla, is vivid, enchanting and haunting. Nabokov has invested his
character with some of his own eloquence, and much of his own exile's poignant
nostalgia. Ishiguro's novel in contrast accepts the limitations of a narrator quite without
eloquence. If he had been reliable, the effect would, of course, have been incredibly
boring.
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 1992 (UK)

34 The Unreliable Narrator David Lodge

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34 The Unreliable Narrator

Based on KAZUO ISHIGURO’s The Remains of the Day (1989)

It is interesting to compare and contrast Ishiguro's novel with another virtuoso

David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 1992 (UK)

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