Plot Summary

Prologue: The Motoring Trip

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the long-serving and meticulously proper butler of Darlington Hall, is encouraged by his new American employer, Mr. Farraday, to take a vacation. Coincidentally, Stevens has just received a letter from Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper who left twenty years prior to get married. Now known as Mrs. Benn, her letter strikes Stevens as nostalgic and hints at the failure of her marriage. Believing she may wish to return to service, Stevens sees an opportunity to solve the staffing shortages at Darlington Hall. He decides to undertake a six-day motoring trip to the West Country, framing the journey as a professional necessity to potentially re-recruit Miss Kenton, while secretly harboring deeper, unacknowledged personal hopes. The journey becomes a deep dive into his own past and the nature of his life’s service.

Day One: Salisbury and the Nature of “Greatness”

As Stevens drives through the English countryside, he feels a sense of liberation mixed with unease at leaving the familiar confines of Darlington Hall. The beauty of the landscape prompts him to reflect on the quality of “greatness,” which he believes England possesses due to its restraint and lack of overt drama. This leads him to an extended rumination on what constitutes a “great” butler.

He dismisses superficial qualities, arguing that the defining trait is dignity—the ability to inhabit one’s professional role so completely that no event, no matter how vexing or alarming, can shake it. He offers his own father, also a butler, as the prime example. He recounts two stories that encapsulate this ideal:
* One tale tells of his father, while chauffeuring his employer’s drunken and insulting guests, bringing the car to a silent, imposing halt to quell their treacherous talk about his employer, Mr. Silvers.
* Another, more poignant story, describes how his father served the very general whose military incompetence led to the needless death of his own elder son, Leonard. Stevens’ father performed his duties with perfect composure for four days, never betraying his profound personal hatred for the man.

For Stevens, this emotional control and unwavering commitment to service, even at immense personal cost, is the pinnacle of professional achievement.

Day Two: Darlington Hall in the 1920s

Stevens’ memories shift to the early 1920s, a pivotal time at Darlington Hall. Lord Darlington, moved by the suicide of a German friend ruined by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, begins his lifelong, misguided crusade to foster Anglo-German reconciliation. He starts hosting informal conferences with influential figures, believing he can steer the course of European politics from the drawing room of his great house.

This period coincides with the arrival of two key figures in Stevens’ life: his aging father, hired as an under-butler, and the new housekeeper, Miss Kenton. A professional tension immediately arises between Stevens and Miss Kenton. She is warm, efficient, and unafraid to challenge him, repeatedly trying to bring a touch of humanity into his starkly professional life, which he rebuffs. She also notices the decline in his father’s abilities—spills, forgotten items, trembling hands—and confronts Stevens, warning that his father is a danger and will eventually commit a major error. Stevens, viewing her concerns as a slight against his father’s dignity, refuses to listen.

The crisis culminates during a crucial international conference in March 1923.
* The Conference: Lord Darlington has gathered high-ranking diplomats from Britain, France, and Germany for secret talks. The stakes are immense, and Stevens drills his staff to perfection, viewing the smooth running of the household as his contribution to history.
* His Father’s Collapse: In the midst of this high-pressure event, Stevens’ father suffers a severe stroke and collapses. Stevens ensures he is taken to his room but immediately returns to his duties.
* The Final Test: That evening, as the conference reaches its triumphant conclusion, Miss Kenton informs Stevens that his father has passed away. Stevens, determined to prove his professional dignity, expresses his thanks but states he is too busy to go to his father’s side, knowing his father “would have wished him to carry on.” He returns to the smoking room to serve the guests, maintaining his composure even as they notice he appears to be crying. He sees this moment not as a personal tragedy, but as the ultimate professional triumph.

Day Three: Lord Darlington’s Politics and a Crisis of Conscience

Stevens’ journey takes him through Somerset, and his memories turn to the 1930s, the height of Lord Darlington’s involvement in appeasement politics. He recalls Lord Darlington’s association with Sir Oswald Mosley’s “blackshirts” and other Nazi sympathizers. A defining incident from this period troubles his memory: the dismissal of two young Jewish housemaids.

Lord Darlington, under the influence of an anti-Semitic guest, orders Stevens to fire them. Miss Kenton is outraged, calling the act “wrong” and a “sin,” and threatens to resign if he carries it out. Stevens, however, argues that their professional duty is to their employer’s wishes, not their own “foibles and sentiments.” He dismisses the maids himself. Miss Kenton does not resign, a fact she later attributes to cowardice, and the event creates a permanent, unspoken rift between them.

During this same period, Miss Kenton begins a courtship with a man from a neighboring village. She informs Stevens of the man’s proposal of marriage. Stevens’s response is cold and professionally detached, though his internal reaction, which he cannot articulate, is far more turbulent. He becomes aware of her crying behind her parlor door but chooses to walk away, prioritizing his duties during another of Lord Darlington’s secret political meetings.

Day Four: The Meeting with Miss Kenton

Stevens arrives in Little Compton, Cornwall, and meets Mrs. Benn in the tea lounge of his hotel. The reunion is polite and nostalgic, but tinged with an underlying melancholy. She has aged gracefully but seems weary, having lost the “spark” he remembers.

He learns that her marriage is not over, as he had hoped. While she admits to periods of profound unhappiness and to wondering about the life she might have had with him, she has grown to love her husband. She is looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild and has accepted her path. She says, “After all, there’s no turning back the clock now. One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been.”

The possibility of her returning to Darlington Hall, and of them having a shared future, is gently but definitively closed. As Stevens drives her to the bus stop in the rain, she confesses that her initial decision to accept her husband’s proposal was partly a “ruse” to make Stevens jealous. For a moment, the tragedy of their unspoken love hangs between them. As she gets on the bus, he sees that her eyes have filled with tears. He tells her she must make the best of the years ahead. At that moment, he admits to the reader, his heart was breaking.

Day Six: Weymouth and The “Remains of the Day”

On the final evening of his trip, Stevens sits on a pier in Weymouth, reflecting on his life. His journey has forced a painful self-assessment. He realizes that his unwavering loyalty was given to a man whose efforts were, at best, a “sad waste” and, at worst, morally catastrophic. Lord Darlington died a broken and disgraced figure, his name forever linked with Nazi appeasement.

In a rare moment of vulnerability, Stevens confesses his feelings to a friendly stranger on the bench, another retired service worker. He admits his sense of emptiness, acknowledging that in giving his all to Lord Darlington, he has nothing left. He questions the very nature of his life’s choices: “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really—one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that?”

The stranger offers simple, profound advice: stop looking back and learn to enjoy the “remains of the day,” telling him, “The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.” Taking this to heart, Stevens resolves to return to Darlington Hall and focus on the future. He decides to master the art of “bantering” to better please his new, informal American employer. He sees this small, seemingly trivial skill as a way to connect with others and find some measure of human warmth in the time he has left.

Characters

Stevens

The narrator and protagonist, Stevens is the archetypal English butler. His entire identity is constructed around a rigid code of “dignity,” which he defines as the complete suppression of personal emotion in favor of flawless professional service. He is intelligent, meticulous, and utterly devoted to his employer, Lord Darlington, whom he considers a great and moral man. His narrative, however, is a masterpiece of self-deception. He consistently justifies his choices—prioritizing duty over his father’s death, carrying out an immoral order to fire Jewish maids, and most significantly, repressing his deep feelings for Miss Kenton—as necessary sacrifices for his profession. His motoring trip becomes an unwitting journey of self-discovery, forcing him to confront the devastating personal and moral consequences of a life spent in service to a flawed ideal and a misguided master.

Miss Kenton (Mrs. Benn)

The former housekeeper of Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton serves as Stevens’s foil and the book’s emotional core. While just as professional and capable as Stevens, she possesses the warmth, passion, and moral clarity he lacks. She repeatedly tries to forge a personal connection with him, bringing flowers to his pantry and challenging his emotional detachment. Her passionate opposition to the dismissal of the Jewish maids highlights her strong ethical compass, which contrasts sharply with Stevens’s blind loyalty. Her decision to leave Darlington Hall to marry Mr. Benn is a pivotal moment, representing a choice for a personal, emotional life—however imperfect—over the sterile perfection of service that Stevens champions. When they meet again twenty years later, she is a woman marked by regret for what might have been, but also one who has found a measure of contentment in the life she chose.

Lord Darlington

The master of Darlington Hall, and the man to whom Stevens dedicates his life. He is a quintessential English aristocrat: honorable, sincere, and driven by a deeply-felt, if naive, sense of duty. Haunted by the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, he devotes his life and fortune to fostering peace and understanding between Britain and Germany in the years leading up to World War II. However, his gentlemanly instincts make him an easy pawn for the manipulative Nazi regime, who use his influence and good name for their own propaganda. He is not a villain but a tragic figure, whose noble intentions pave the way for disastrous outcomes. He dies after the war, a disgraced and broken man, his reputation ruined and his life’s work revealed as a catastrophic failure.

Mr. Farraday

Stevens’s new employer and the American owner of Darlington Hall. Mr. Farraday represents the modern, post-war world. He is informal, gregarious, and values friendliness and “bantering” over the stiff formality of the old English system. His presence serves as a constant, gentle disruption to Stevens’s world, highlighting how out of place the old ways have become. It is his encouragement that sets Stevens on his journey, and it is the challenge of learning to serve him—by mastering banter—that provides Stevens with a small, hopeful purpose for the future.

Core Themes

Dignity and Service vs. Personal Fulfillment

This is the novel’s central conflict. Stevens builds his entire existence on an ideal of professional dignity that demands the complete suppression of his own emotions, opinions, and desires. He believes that true worth comes from flawlessly serving a “great gentleman.” This devotion leads him to sacrifice everything personal: a relationship with his father, his own moral judgment, and, most tragically, the possibility of love with Miss Kenton. The novel is a profound exploration of the cost of such self-denial, questioning whether a life devoid of personal connection and fulfillment can truly be considered a worthy one, no matter how perfectly a role is played.

Memory, Regret, and Self-Deception

The entire narrative is an act of memory, filtered through Stevens’s deeply unreliable perspective. As he travels, he tries to construct a history for himself that casts his life of service as noble and meaningful. However, his carefully constructed narrative is full of holes. He downplays his own feelings, re-frames his failures of nerve as professional triumphs, and avoids confronting the moral bankruptcy of Lord Darlington’s political project. The journey slowly forces him to confront the truth he has spent a lifetime avoiding, leading to the heartbreaking realization of his wasted potential for love and the devastating emptiness of his regret.

The Politics of Unquestioning Loyalty

On a political level, the novel is a powerful allegory about the dangers of political quietism and blind obedience. Stevens believes that it is not his place to “meddle in the great affairs of the nation” but simply to serve his master. This professional code mirrors the political apathy of those who stood by while catastrophic historical events unfolded. By faithfully serving Lord Darlington, Stevens becomes an enabler of the Nazi appeasement movement. His personal tragedy—realizing his life was spent in service to a misguided cause—reflects a broader national and historical failure, suggesting that true dignity requires moral awareness and a willingness to question authority, not just perfect service.

The Passing of an Era

The novel is steeped in a sense of elegy for a lost world. Darlington Hall, once a hub of international influence, is now a diminished property owned by an American. The grand staff has been reduced to a skeleton crew. The old English aristocracy, with its code of honor and its belief in gentlemanly amateurs shaping world affairs, has been proven tragically inadequate for the brutal realities of the 20th century. Stevens himself is a relic of this bygone era, a man whose entire value system has become obsolete, leaving him stranded in a modern world whose rules he does not understand.

Plot devices

First-Person Unreliable Narrator

The story’s power is derived almost entirely from its narrative voice. Stevens tells his own story, but he is a classic unreliable narrator. His language is formal, repressed, and emotionally detached, yet it betrays the deep turmoil beneath the surface. He presents his life as a model of professional integrity, but the reader slowly pieces together a different story—one of emotional cowardice, missed opportunities, and profound self-deception. This gap between what Stevens says and what the reader understands is the primary source of the novel’s tragic irony and emotional depth.

Flashback

The novel’s structure is a constant interplay between the present and the past. The physical journey of the motoring trip in 1956 serves as a framing device for a much more significant psychological journey into Stevens’s memories of the 1920s and 1930s. This technique allows Ishiguro to juxtapose the aging, reflective Stevens with his younger, more certain self, and to slowly reveal the critical past events that have shaped his present predicament. The past does not just inform the present; it haunts and defines it.

Symbolism

Ishiguro uses powerful symbols to deepen the novel’s themes:
* Darlington Hall: More than just a setting, the house symbolizes the fading world of the English aristocracy and the insular, self-contained universe in which Stevens has lived. Its grand, empty rooms and dust-sheeted wings in 1956 reflect the decay of an old order and the emptiness of Stevens’s own life.
* The Motoring Trip: The literal journey through the English countryside is a metaphor for Stevens’s internal journey into his past. As he navigates unfamiliar roads, he is also forced to navigate the unfamiliar and treacherous terrain of his own repressed emotions and memories.
* The “Remains of the Day”: The title itself is the novel’s central metaphor. It refers to the evening of life and the question of what to do with the time one has left. The final scene on the pier at sunset, where a stranger advises Stevens to enjoy the evening as “the best part of the day,” crystallizes this theme, offering a small glimmer of hope that even after a life of regret, some measure of peace and warmth can still be found.