Abstract

This paper examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day through the modernist lens. The paper attempts to evaluate areas of convergences and a few areas of divergences where modernist thought reflects in the novel. Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Stevens in sporadic recollections in disjointed timelines showing him as an asocial and dysfunctional character that is unable to enter into warm relationship with other characters especially Miss Kenton whom he hates to love but after he examines the true nature of his relationship with her at the end, he is full of regrets for suppressing his feelings for her. The novel shows several modernist tendencies such as a heavy deployment of interior monologue, a gradual revelation of the human condition, lack of objectivity, mental repression, open endedness, disintegration, and other tendencies which characterises modernist writings. Georg Lukacs’s “The Ideology of Modernism” and Virginia Woolf’s influential essay on modernism “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” were used as theoretical frameworks for the evaluation of the modernist conceptions in the novel. The paper reveals that the novel is modernist in many ways while it also has some aspects which are not entirely modern in a strict modernist sense.