Cold, Colder, Coldest: Stevens’s Absent Father and Repressed Trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day has been analyzed for postcolonial and historicist readings, or for the psychological or postmodernist valences of its unreliable narrator, whose long devotion to ‘dignity’ blinds him from recognizing his service to a Nazi sympathizer and freezes his personal life. Less work has inquired into the root causes of Stevens’s emotional self-denial, or why it might matter. This study borrows from Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and its depiction of post-war trauma, and interrogates Stevens’s memory repressions and idealizations of his father to hypothesize that his actions may result from ‘father hunger,’ the psychological distress received from an emotionally absent and unsupportive paternal figure. This view may allow productive re-interpretation of Stevens’s behaviours and of the text.