What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy.
From The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
I’m pretty sure it should be, “the likes of you and me.”
And yet. Could this reflect British English of the day (70 years ago) or an English dialect?
I wonder if the grammar error was intended by Ishiguro as an indication of the narrator’s character, associating himself with the upper crust though not having had their education. I’ve read the book but don’t remember enough about it to be able to argue the possibility much more than this….
Searches of Google books and Amazon’s “Look inside” copies of the book do turn up this exact passage, though I did find one edition of the book that contains “the likes of you and me”:
http://tinyurl.com/yau7bbmk
And in another of his books he uses “the likes of you and me” several times:
http://tinyurl.com/y8w3fwz3