The Remains of the Would-Be Novelist

I read “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro during part of my layover in the UAE and loved it. For those who haven't read it, it's the story of a British butler who was employed by a British lord accused of having Nazi sympathies during the interwar period. The frame for the story is the butler's road trip across England, during which he reflects back on his past.

I went through a stage where I tried to write short stories about anti-heroes. An anti-hero is very different from a villain. The anti-hero is a good person who wants deeply to do the right thing but attaches himself to a futile, worthless or sinister cause without realizing it and lives his life in vain.

The literary hero can also take wrong actions, but there is a process of struggle and realization present in the hero that can only come to the anti-hero at the end. The conflict undergirdding the classic hero narrative is the hero’s struggle with his wrong choices; whereas the conflict framing the plot of the antiheroic tale is the anti-hero’s struggle to perform his unheroic actions and win his unepic battles. In this sense, Ian McEwan’s novel “ The Innocent” is not an unheroic tale, but instead a story about a hero who commits great evil and who the reader must sympathize with anyway and feel we could do no other were we in his shoes.

In general, I only like stories where the writer accords her characters with a certain amount of respect; I find Nicholas Hornby addictive but it took me a little while to get over his shabby (but hysterical) treatment of his protagonists. I think Ishiguro is particularly masterful in “Remains of the Day” because he treats his main character with so much respect, and forces readers to feel concern for the daily drama of the butler.