“Yet, even through the shivery pathos of Stevens’ recognition of his misguided idealism and barren life, the wry comedy remains. This pattern of simultaneous admission and denial, revelation and concealment, emerges as the defining feature of the butler’s personality.” Although he is too honest not to provide all the incriminating facts about Darlington, Stevens is still so caught up in his own dream of serving a gentleman of international renown that he keeps trying to paint away the blemishes in his Lordship’s portrait. “Much of what Stevens tells us in the middle sections of the novel is about the man he once thought was the epitome of moral worth. Underneath what Stevens says, something else is being said, and the something else eventually turns out to be a moving series of chilly revelations of the butler’s buried life-and, by implication, a powerful critique of the social machine in which he is a cog. Ishiguro’s command of Stevens’ corseted idiom is masterly, and nowhere more tellingly so than in the way he controls the progressive revelation of unintended ironic meaning.
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