This post is part of my series on Kazuo Ishiguro. This post does not yet have notes from the Harry Ransom Center.

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This is my favorite book of all time for a couple of reasons. First, it is extremely well-executed on a technical level. Ishiguro executes the unreliable narrator like no other, and the prose is very tightly written. Second, this book manages to elicit emotions and make me think about my own life in ways that few books can. I don’t want to sound overdramatic by saying this book changed my life, but it is somewhat true: I reread it every couple of years, and it has changed the way I approach life.

Throughout the whole book, Stevens maintains a facade of being the perfect servant with utterly no attachments. But through understanding everything that he doesn’t say—pretending to visit Miss Kenton for staffing reasons, or hiding his employment history for reasons he can’t verbalize—we eventually realize that this is a man who has profoundly wasted his life and regrets it all.

As part of his quest to become the perfect servant, Stevens never gives any indication of how he is feeling. We can only glean his emotions from how other people perceive him: Miss Kenton asking him why he was stomping around so angrily when she said she was leaving, people giving him a handkerchief even though Stevens gave zero indication of crying, and so on.

There is, of course, one exception: near the end of the book, Miss Kenton tells him that it is too late and they cannot turn back the clock. It is then that Stevens finally says it: “Indeed — why should I not admit it? — at that moment, my heart was breaking.” I vividly remember reaching that point the first time I read the book, and it was like that tiny crack in Stevens’ defenses broke my own dam. All of the feelings that I didn’t even realize had been bubbling up inside of me just burst, and by the end of the novel, I felt like I’d been emotionally blown to pieces. I was crying without fully understanding why I was even crying.

Stevens seeks Miss Kenton with the hopes of finding redemption for his wasted life, but though she hints at having had some regrets herself, she tells him quite plainly that it is all too late and one must live with the choices they made. And for Stevens, that is not just the fact that he dedicated his life to a Nazi sympathizer and ran away from love, but that he ultimately refused to take responsibility for his actions his entire life. As he says at the end, even if Lord Darlington was supporting the wrong cause, at least he took moral responsibility and made his own choices.

What struck me most upon rereading the book was how all of those moments that Stevens viewed as his most professionally triumphant are the ones where he denied his truest emotions: neglecting his father on his deathbed, not saying anything to Miss Kenton when she told him Mr. Benn would likely propose. Stevens tells himself that this is in the name of dignity, but we see through it by the end of the book: there is nothing noble or dignified about running away from the scary parts of being human.

Ishiguro describes how he conceptualized the climactic moment of the book in his Nobel prize lecture:

The story I’d just finished was about an English butler who realises, too late in his life, that he has lived his life by the wrong values; and that he’s given his best years to serving a Nazi sympa-thizer; that by failing to take moral and political responsibility for his life, he has in some profound sense wasted that life. And more: that in his bid to become the perfect servant, he has forbidden himself to love, or be loved by, the one woman he cares for.

I’d read through my manuscript several times, and I’d been reasonably satisfied. Still, there was a niggling feeling that something was missing.

Then, as I say, there I was, in our house one evening, on our sofa, listening to Tom Waits. And Tom Waits began to sing a song called ‘Ruby’s Arms’. Perhaps some of you know it. (I even thought about singing it to you at this point, but I’ve changed my mind.) It’s a ballad about a man, possibly a soldier, leaving his lover asleep in bed. It’s the early morning, he goes down the road, gets on a train. Nothing unusual in that. But the song is delivered in the voice of a gruff American hobo utterly unaccustomed to revealing his deeper emotions. And there comes a moment, midway through the song, when the singer tells us that his heart is breaking. The moment is almost unbearably moving because of the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to declare it. Tom Waits sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness.

As I listened to Tom Waits, I realised what I’d still left to do. I’d unthinkingly made the decision, somewhere way back, that my English butler would maintain his emotional defences, that he’d manage to hide behind them, from himself and his reader, to the very end. Now I saw I had to reverse that decision. Just for one moment, towards the end of my story, a moment I’d have to choose carefully, I had to make his armour crack. I had to allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed underneath.

There is another quote from the book that I think about often:

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Because it’s true, isn’t it? We always feel that there will be more time to sort out or go after what we want. But this book made me feel, more than anything else, the importance of acting with the knowledge that time is finite. It made me determined to not finish my life with regrets, to be proactive so that I will not look back and regret those turning points where I did nothing. That is perhaps a long-winded way of saying YOLO, but nothing has made me feel that quite as acutely as this book did.

Another thing I found striking is how Stevens is so preoccupied with these notions of dignity and being a great butler—things that nobody else cares about despite it being his entire world. It’s like a small reminder to myself that no matter how frustrating or upsetting a work-related issue may be, it ultimately does not matter as much in the grand scheme of things.

Aside from the emotions of the book, Ishiguro also plays with interesting ideas of power and greatness, which Stevens uses as an excuse to deny his personal responsibility (the idea that few of us are actually in positions of power to exert greatness, so one must dedicate themselves to a supporting role like a butler instead).