The Remains of the Day Themes
Friendship
What lays the foundation for an ideal friendship? Being in elementary school together? Growing up on the same block? Meeting in a fraternity? Whatever it is, it's definitely not working together, r...
Repression
The thing about sexual repression is that sexual feelings are never totally repressed. They always manage to find weird ways of letting you know they still exist—hey, Freud built a career out of...
Guilt and Blame
The narrator reflects back to the 1930s from a point ten years after the end of World War II and the devastating consequences of the Holocaust. While the 1945 Nuremberg Trials of Nazis and their as...
Memory and the Past
In history class we learn a lot about important events and people. The news is filled with important things every day. But where does an ordinary person fit into all of this? The Remains of the Day...
Principles (Duty, Dignity, Professionalism)
The Remains of the Day focuses on the life of a butler who has devoted his entire life to his profession, with very, very little time to spare for a personal life. Sheesh, that seems bleak.This nov...
Society and Class
The uber-stratified society described in The Remains of the Day can seem a little foreign—a lot of us wouldn't be able to identify a gentleman if he hit us with his monocle. And yet all of the ch...
Politics (Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Englishness)
The Remains of the Day tackles some of the important questions that were raised in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust—but only some, because approximately one gajillion super-importa...
Exploration
When compared to great stories of exploration such as The Odyssey or On The Road, the journey described in The Remains of the Day seems kind of laughable. There are no exotic lands, strange creatur...