A Post-colonial Study Of The Otherness In The Remains Of The Day

The Remains of the Day is a representative work of Kazuo Ishiguro,which won him the Booker prize in 1989.The novel is about an old British butler who had to serve his new American master after the death of Lord Darlington,whose cultural values were completely different.This can be seen as a reflection of the whole British people's status after the Britain empire declined.The British people generally turned from the "subjectivity" to&"the other".At the end of the novel,Stevens finally changed his attitude toward the new culture and adjusted to his new status,which reflects Ishiguro's confidence in the self-identity reconstruction of British people.This thesis aims at interpreting The Remains of the Day from the perspective of post-colonial criticism The main body of this thesis falls into two parts:The first part is an analysis of identity change of Stevens on the basis of Foucault's power discourse theory and interprets the reason why his identity changed from the "subjectivity" to"the other" and how this change affects his daily life.Through the change of attitude towards career,family and society,we can explore the various identity crisis confusion faced by the protagonist and his effort to reconstruct his self-identity.The second part analyses the influence of the author's immigration status on his literary creation,and the cultural consciousness in the novel on the basis of Orientalism.The analysis of the Otherness of both the author,Ishiguro and the character Stevens will help us achieve a better understanding of Ishiguro and his novel's cultural value and discourse significance.Ishiguro's writing about self-identity crisis and reconstruction expresses his consciousness of reflection of the society,and also provide implications on the whole immigrants identity cognation problems.