Towards the end of the novel, Harry Smith proposes another definition of dignity: that dignity is inherent to every British citizen, who-as a member of a democracy-has both the privilege and the right to contribute to the country’s progress. Calmness, tact, and circumspection are especially important for a butler, who is meant to act as if invisible in the presence of employers: Stevens sometimes reflects on the need to balance a sense of constant availability with invisibility, especially when he’s serving only Lord Darlington and a friend in the massive dining room, for instance. Stevens adopts this mode of discretion and professionalism, which he doesn’t link to the status of a credentialed expert (in fact, he’s skeptical of this definition), but rather to the necessity of following the duties of one’s position. He is utterly committed to his work and refuses to allow personal affairs to get in the way of his professional requirements: even when he collapses while pushing a trolley, an event that will lead to his death, he continues attempting to push it from the floor. Stevens’s father is offered as one model of dignity.

To be a great butler, in Stevens’s terms, is to have dignity, but there is never one single definition of dignity given: instead, Stevens offers a number of examples and anecdotes as he feels his way towards an understanding of how he has structured his own life. Although Stevens has, by his own account, spent his life attempting to embody dignity, he also spends much of the novel pondering what precisely that means.

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