Abstract
The Remains of the Day' was written in 1989 by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese author living in England. This novel is a narrative, whose main character is Mr Stevens, an English butler, who is retrospectively telling the story of his life, both in the past and present tense, for his narrative goes back and forth in time, between the past and the moment he is writing. He is at the end of his life and career, and this narrative constitutes an analysis of what he has done throughout his life as a butler. His main questions concern dignity and greatness, which are the essential qualities in his job. I will demonstrate in this essay, how the importance he gave to these two notions led him to self effacement. The first idea I will study is Stevens's dignity as a butler, then I will deal with the notion of dignity as a human quality, and finally, I will show Stevens as an English character created by a Japanese author.
