Heteroglossia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic nature of novelistic discourse is in fact a paradigm of freedom, the freedom of speech, especially. The present paper deals with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day (1989) from the point of view of novelistic dialogue or heteroglossia. Starting from Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia it explores the parodic stylization of incorporated languages in the novel, with special focus on the butler’s confession as a double-accented, double-style hybrid construction. The novel is shown to be a parodic representation of Englishness. The paper also examines the mechanism of hiding and revealing in the context of the butler’s construction of identity and maps character zones, showing how fragments of character speech are filtered through Stevens’s speech which is in its turn appropriated by the author’s voice.

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