Discipline In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day

Kazuo Ishiguro,author of seven novels and winner of 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature,is best acclaimed for the 1989 Booker-winning novel The Remains of the Day.The novel depicts butler Stevens’ s six-day road trip to the west of England in July 1956 in the form of travelogue.With established scholarship focusing on topics like postcolonial discourse,Englishness and narrative strategies of the novel,the present study undertakes to discuss Foucaultian discipline in the novel.It aims to examine the disciplinary mechanisms in the lives of all three major characters placed on different levels of social hierarchy,Lord Darlington,his butler Stevens and his housekeeper Miss Kenton.It argues that British imperialism is the Foucaultian panopticon that disciplines each of them in different forms.In so doing it seeks to explore Ishiguro’s humanistic concerns in his signature work and its contemporary relevance.The disciplining of Lord Darlington is discussed first.It maintains that this is a double-edged disciplining in that the disciplinary power of imperialism works upon him in two ways.On the one hand,the British gentleman culture comes into play with the superior power of imperialism and makes Darlington,member of the more privileged aristocratic class,a gallant gentleman in helping the defeated Germany ill-treated by the Treaty of Versailles.On the other hand,an imperialistic mindset fans his gallant sympathy into a favor of fascism over democracy in the 1930 s and makes him a traitor to the British monarch and publically condemned during World War II and after.Discussed next is the disciplining of Stevens,who is also the narrator of the novel.It argues that Darlington Hall is literally a panoramic prison for him in his 35 years of loyal service to Lord Darlington.The disciplinary mechanism working upon him is his total submission to the hierarchy of imperial power in pursuing a lifelong dream of being a “great” butler in Great Britain at the cost of a personal life defined by self-repression and emotional denial.Discussed last is the disciplining of Miss Kenton.Lowest on the hierarchy of imperial power that is also patriarchal,she is significantly disciplined by the patriarchal power in her career and her personal life.With a butler well-disciplined to the mechanism and docility and utility supervising her work,Miss Kenton is coerced into the same mechanism that she tries toresist with all her might but in vain.Her final and resistance is to leave Darlington Hall to marry,but only finds her heart still caring for Stevens to maintain a happy marriage.In conclusion,the study suggests that the world of The Remains of the Day is a world with conspicuous disciplinary power with various forms of disciplinary mechanisms.As much as Ishiguro demonstrates how the disciplinary power of British imperialism works in the first half of the twentieth century,disciplining is also a part of our life in the twentieth-first century.Whatever Ishiguro suggests in his tale of disciplinary power of imperialism told through personal record of volatile public history,he makes a public appeal on more conscious living in a disciplinary society.