The narrator, Mr. Stevens, is an aging butler who has been working at the same grand home for decades. In the 1950s, that grand home is owned by an American, a kindly man who encourages Mr. Stevens to take some time off. Mr. Stevens embarks on a weeklong road trip to visit a woman he still thinks of as Miss Kenton, though she has been married for years now. She was once a housekeeper working alongside him during the 1920s and 1930s, the pinnacle of his butlerhood, when the house belonged to Lord Darlington.
The novel alternates between Mr. Stevens' observations about his road trip and his reminiscences about his years under Lord Darlington. What I enjoyed most about this book is that it's difficult to pin the narrator down - who is he, really?
He says that being a butler is much more than wearing a costume of professionalism that one easily discards. A butler must be, at almost all times, in complete mastery of emotions, impeccable at service, ever correct in conduct, and placing the needs of his employer first. Only when a butler is completely alone, says Mr. Stevens, can he shed his professional demeanor.
The thing is, Mr. Stevens never seems to set aside his professional demeanor. Even in moments in the book when he's on his own, his mind is focused on professional matters. When it's revealed at one point that he sometimes reads sentimental love stories, he claims it's primarily to improve the way he speaks on the job. Though he unbends enough to admit to sometimes enjoying the content of the stories, this enjoyment is secondary to professional improvement.
He can't even talk about personal matters without first making them professional. His wish to visit Miss Kenton after all these years holds personal interest to him, but he ultimately justifies his trip by saying that he wants to talk to her about her potential return into service as a housekeeper, so that she can help him with a current staffing shortage. When he talks about his father, who was also a butler, he focuses not on their father-son relationship but on his father as a professional servant. (Mr. Stevens Sr., on his death bed, expresses the doubt that he's been a good father to his son, but Mr. Stevens Jr. dashes away to fulfill some duties rather than speak of this matter to his father.)
It's clear that Mr. Stevens is disconnected from himself emotionally, but is the disconnect really so powerful that he can barely understand himself? Or is he still deliberately acting the part of butler to his current audience, the reader? Because if he's addressing the reader, he isn't entirely alone, and he can't quite shed his butler persona and talk about certain personal issues more directly. Then again, the butler persona seems to be much more than a persona to Mr. Stevens. It's not acting - it's something that he's integrated into himself so deeply, and he probably wouldn't know how to behave without it.
Towards the end of the book, he speaks most openly about his profound regrets, but interestingly, he doesn't address this revelatory speech to the reader, but to a stranger who happens to be sitting next to him at a pier. The reader finds out by listening in, as it were.
Maybe confronting his regrets too directly, as an explicit part of his narrative to the reader, would lead to utter mental collapse. He needs his butler duties to prop him up. His commitment to duty has sheltered him all these years from overly close contact with other people, though of course they've left him with regrets. One regret is missing the opportunity to marry Miss Kenton. Another is that his former employer, Lord Darlington, who received Mr. Stevens' unquestioning loyalty and self-sacrifice, was a Nazi appeaser – maybe not so much because he subscribed to Nazi ideology but because he was a dupe who helped the Nazis influence other well-connected, powerful Brits to take a similar stance on appeasement.
So what's left for Mr. Stevens at the end? He mentions that he needs to learn how to banter, as bantering seems to be a way to connect with people. However, his main reason for learning banter is to better please his new American employer. He's a butler, through and through, to the end. It could be that's the impression he wants to leave to the reader, but it's also probably the only solid reality he can hang onto in his life, the only way he knows how to keep living.
