Open    Access



The Futility of Striving: A Marxist Reading of The Remains of the Day



Author(s)

YANG Haining

Full-Text PDF XML     49 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.10.003

Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers. He has received many prestigious awards for his works, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. As one of Ishiguro’s best-known novels, The Remains of the Day follows the introspective journey of Stevens, an English butler, whose lifelong dedication to his profession culminates in a profound realization of a wasted life and misguided faith. Drawing on Marxist criticism, this essay examines how Stevens’s understanding of dignity legitimizes class subordination and how his labor estranges him from his agency, emotions, and relationships. His unquestioning loyalty to Lord Darlington transforms service into a moral ideal, while professional discipline leads him to suppress personal judgment and intimate feeling. Through Stevens’s belated recognition of the emptiness of his life, Ishiguro exposes the human cost of internalized domination and suggests that genuine dignity depends on agency, emotional connection, and the capacity to give meaning to one’s own life.

The Remains of the Day, Marxist Theory, dignity, alienated labor

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, October 2026, Vol. 16, No. 10, 814-817