I read this book as if “the dignity of a butler” was a metaphor for what it means to be a good person.
Stevens spends the beginning of the book trying to define dignity. He talks to other butlers, looks at his father, wonders whether dignity comes naturally or can be learned. To me, this felt like asking what a good person looks like. We take advice from wise people, we look at role models, and we wonder whether we can become better people even if we were not born into the “elite club.”
One of the ideas that stayed with me was his question of whether dignity can really exist unless it is tested. Without hardship, can we really say someone has dignity? It reminded me of Man’s Search for Meaning, where Frankl says that unless someone can honestly say they would not behave the same way under the same circumstances, they should be careful judging others. The same question applies here: Can someone really say they are good if their goodness has never been tested?
Another thing I kept thinking about was Stevens’s relationship with emotions.
There were two moments where he showed emotion to the outside world but refused to acknowledge it inside himself. One was when his father died. The other was when Miss Kenton told him she was leaving to get married. Other people could see something was happening to him, but internally he refused to participate in it.
I found it difficult to understand. I’m Turkish, so emotions are everything for us. They are part of who you are. I couldn’t wrap my head around being afraid of them.
The relationship between Stevens and Miss Kenton was fascinating. I don’t know whether he consciously loved her, whether the trip was an unconscious attempt to love, or whether the romance novel scene was Ishiguro winking at the reader about Stevens’s emotional state. I don’t think those questions have definitive answers.
What I do think is that, at the end, when Miss Kenton says she sometimes wondered what life with Stevens might have been like, it felt less like a declaration of love and more like a parting gift. She knew nothing could happen anymore. But she cared enough about him to make him see that there is more to life than being a butler.
The old man on the bench also stayed with me:
“You’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. A couple more years and it might be too late.”
From the moment I read it, it didn’t feel like advice about walking up a hill. It felt like advice about life. Don’t postpone living because one day the opportunity simply won’t be there anymore.
Another small moment I loved was when Stevens didn’t run over the chicken. It was one of the very few moments that genuinely put him in good spirits, and it happened completely outside his world as a butler. Just a simple act of kindness, appreciated by another person.
The ending disappointed me.
Even though Stevens briefly admits that evening is the best part of the day, he still finishes the novel trying to stretch the day by becoming better at banter. I wanted him to become more in touch with himself, but he still identified himself primarily as a butler.
One distinction the ending made me think about is that there are two different kinds of dignity in the novel.
The first is the dignity of being a butler.
The second is the dignity of life itself.
When Stevens reflects that perhaps there is dignity in making your own mistakes, he is no longer talking about butlers. He is talking about living. The tragedy is that he seems to realize, very late, that being an excellent butler and living a dignified human life are not necessarily the same thing.
