In the novels The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton the authors’ choices about the narrative point of view that the story is told from influences the story in many ways. The distance that the narrator is from the other characters in the story and the plot that they’re conveying varies between the two novels, but both work to incorporate perspective and irony into the story, therefore influencing the tone and mood of the novel.
In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s narrator is also the main character of the story, Mr Stevens. Because of that, the narrator is very close to the subject of the novel. This closeness doesn’t necessarily mean that the narrator has a solid grasp on what he’s telling the audience. In fact, he’s a very good example of an unreliable narrator. Much of the plot and theme is conveyed subtextually, and not focused on by the narrator, because the point is that he’s avoiding painful things in his past and is therefore unwilling or unable to acknowledge them. Stevens’ narrative often glazes over incredibly important points in order to focus on smaller, less significant points, as if by ignoring them and avoiding them he can make them go away. This is interesting because it actually has the opposite effect on the reader, because Ishiguro don’t just tell the reader that Stevens is repressed,
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He also continuously misunderstands, misconstrues, and over-analyzes the letter that Miss Kenton sent to him, reading it and rereading it until he’s absolutely positive