We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(4) Base Camp
The trickiest thing about The Remains of the Day isn't Stevens's formal-to-a-fault language, and it's not figuring out the history behind the events of post-WWI England. It's reading between the lines.
Stevens is doing the English butler equivalent of shooting straight… but he's also a total weirdo. He's obsessed with dignity, and obsessed with being a good butler. Everything else is secondary.
So it's up to you to figure out what Stevens is feeling when Stevens himself is more bottled-up than a shaken can of Pepsi. Stevens doesn't allow himself (until the end of the novel) to show the reader—or even himself—his vulnerable side. We have to piece together a human portrait of Stevens by second-guessing his robot-sounding statements and constantly looking for the undercurrent of humanity beneath his stony exterior.