unit 3: prose fiction 1 — kazuo ishiguro’s The remains of the day

meeting 3: “trivial matters,” “simple oversights”

Good reading often means recognizing patterns and building a network of passages that begin to speak to one another. Let me begin today by taking you through one such network that I’ve been annotating, a series of moments in which Mr. Stevens seems almost obsessed with minimizing mistakes, failures, and embarrassments as things smaller and more forgivable than they really are. Taken together, these passages might help us understand why Stevens is so quick to rationalize the behavior of the people he loves.

I’ll ask one or two of you to take us to a moment from the recent reading that stands out to you.

In the second half of class, we’ll read a prose passage and begin to discuss prose analysis thesis statements. Note that your first prose analysis has been scheduled for either November 3 or 4.

Homework:

Read The Remains of the Day, pages 164-201.

meetings 1/2: the task of prose analysis

Prose analysis is the work we do on a single page to help us uncover larger ideas in a work of fiction. We’ll begin our study of Ishiguro’s novel with our first real prose analysis of the year, using a passage from The Remains of the Day. Here’s your prompt:

The following excerpt is from Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. In this passage, a son in his middle years visits his dying father in the father’s bedroom. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Ishiguro uses literary elements and techniques to portray the complex relationship between the father and the son.

Let’s consider the features of the prompt first and then work the passage together.

After, there are three questions I’d like us to consider:

What is your wider impression of Mr. Stevens beyond our close reading passage?

What do you see Ishiguro setting up thematically in the early going?

What is the genre of the novel as far as you can tell?

At the end of the class, I’ll introduce periodic sentences, your next sentence type. [BB] [KK]

Homework:

For meeting 2:

(1) Read “Point of View” and “The Unreliable Narrator” in David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction.

For meeting 3:

(1) Read The Remains of the Day, pages 129-164, stopping at the end of the paragraph ending “I have never quite been able to decide.”