“The Remains of the day” is the story of a butler, Mr. Stevens, who narrates his own story filled with philosophical discussions about his life and profession. By the end of the novel, the perceptive reader can realize that his narration happens to be quite unreliable because when he relives memories in a way that reassure him his life hasn’t been wasted in meaningless service. The concept of an unreliable narrator changes the way one sees the story for it enrich it by giving us the story of a man that is lying to himself, may that be in a conscious manner or not.
In her Journal Article "The Remains of the Day" and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration” Kathleen Wall tries to analyze how Ishiguro’s books has presented a challenge to the traditional notions of an unreliable narrator (which will be explained further on), by giving text examples she tries to prove that the novel has presented readers this specific literary device in a way that has not been treated before by scholars and theorists. This article is relevant to understand the novel because it explains in detail how Stevens’s narration may be considered an unreliable, and how that particular fact has to affect our perceptions as readers of his story.
“The novel also asks us to formulate new paradigms of unreliability for the narrator whose split subjectivity, rather than moral blindness or intellectual bias, gives rise to unreliable narration. Because Stevens himself is the conscious source of much