Disclaimer: Personally, I find the nihilistic approach to life to be – not always, though often – depressing and self-destructive. I have experienced things in life which would be hard for me to dismiss as mere coincidences. I do believe that everything happens for a reason and that there is a larger purpose to our lives. However, in order to do justice to this beautiful novel, I am arguing for the author’s beliefs as they are expressed in Never Let Me Go. Now, without further ado, let’s hop right into this essay:
Kazuo Ishiguro’s brand-new novel, Klara and the Sun, is coming out in less than a month and the timing couldn’t be better for me to recall his Never Let Me Go, which I was taught in my high-school English class. The story follows the young Kathy who is raised, with a bunch of other kids, in the gated community of the Hailsham boarding school. There’s nothing abnormal about these youngsters until we realise, alongside the protagonists, that they are clones whose purpose is to donate their vital organs for transplants. After reading this synopsis, I can imagine you thinking that this sci-fi novel is a warning about the ethics of scientific advancements. Critics, like Marks, have already voiced this opinion. But what is so fascinating about Never Let Me Go is that it’s so much more than this. It is an existential allegory for human mortality and what happens in modern-day society when we realise the proximity of our deaths.
The story is structured in three parts each reflecting a stage in the cycle of human life. The first part focusing on Hailsham, which is surrounded by a “fence,” represents the protected world of one’s childhood. The second part observes the characters – now grown up – at the Cottages, which are the physical manifestation of adulthood. And finally, there’s the Recovery Centres, the place where they donate their organs, thus, paralleling with the futility of people’s deaths. This is a message to the reader with regards to the human condition; our lives have a beginning, a middle and an end and we can do nothing to avert our deaths.
What we can do, however, is create cultural artefacts for future generations as tokens of our existence. This is what the clones do. They engage in art, painting pieces which are then taken by Hailsham benefactors and exhibited in a gallery. Drawing from the Latourian concept of actor-network theory – which Ishiguro was probably familiar with from his university studies in philosophy – the clones’ artworks are quasi-objects. This means that they are composed of both human – the dexterity put into them – and nonhuman – the canvas and the paint – elements. The clones’ paintings are thus symbolic of the way individuals in society try to defy mortality by preserving their existence in their artistic creations which are able to be accessed posthumously.
In the face of mortality, the clones also try to find purpose in their lives by devising optimistic speculations about the future. A rumour spreads around the halls of Hailsham that, if deemed worthy, the characters might be able to defer their donations. There are also talks of Norfolk being a place to reunite with lost ones, conceived by a rather funny incident where a geography teacher at Hailsham refers to it as “the lost corner of England”. These, of course, are both metaphors for how humanity faces mortality. As Ngai, the cultural theorist, and Rosenwein, the famous social constructionist, note, in our society “emotions depend on […] oral beliefs”. Hence, the sentiment of hope is, likewise – in our case – generated by the religious stories we craft of an afterlife. Through these, we comfort ourselves by extending our lifespans and providing our otherwise pointless lives with a purpose.
But these rumours are eventually revealed to be nothing more than faux stories, which causes the clones to submissively accept their futile fates. This reaction might initially sound baffling. I remember my high-school classmates in English class frustratedly asking: why don’t the clones rebel? The renowned philosopher, Foucault, is helpful in answering this. In his 1975 work, Discipline and Punish, he depicts the modern-day individual’s fetish for discipline and self-surveillance as the result of an epistemic shift to empirical thought. With the emergence of science, society is no longer depended on religion to understand the world, gaining access to knowledge that often contradicts spiritual faith. This rise of secularism is responsible for the clones’ passivity as they can no longer see another hopeful alternative and are forced to accept their dooms.
This inevitability of the clones’ escape from their demise is tragically reinforced in the novel’s chilling conclusion when the protagonist, Kathy, visits Norfolk. Here, the idea of Norfolk being a place to reunite with lost ones is juxtaposed by Ishiguro’s use of setting and the stark imagery of rubbish getting caught up in barbed wire. Ishiguro is taking additional advantage of his landscape by making – to put it in Jane Bennet’s words – “inanimate things […] to act, to produce effects”. Hence, the gloomy landscape causes Kathy to further digest the inescapability from the hands of mortality and eventually give up on her fantasies of reuniting with her deceased lover. Her following anticlimactic statement, “the fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it,” contains in itself an ominous oxymoron as Kathy is trying to stay within the boundaries, whereas the idea of a “fantasy” is to surpass reality. This disturbingly-repressed tone is manifested in the novel’s closing sentence where Kathy futilely drives off to wherever it is she is supposed to be, knowing she will soon be met with her own death. This is, of course, a symbol of our own insidious, inescapable human condition – an allegory for our own existential insecurity as we gradually realise we have no control over our fragile lives.
The reason why Never Let Me Go is so chilling, heart-breaking and ultimately compelling is because it is a story about us. The disturbingly-innocent voices of the Hailsham clones telling each other little stories to brush off the ghastly reality regarding their futures belong to us. What grants Never Let Me Go such terror is the intangibility of its threat, a threat that is much closer to modern day, where our secular society comes to dismantle our comforting religious beliefs. Ultimately, the clones’ wishes to never let each other go remain unfulfilled, in this way, reaffirming the fragility of human life in the technological era. At the same time, this is perhaps a message for us to appreciate and value every second of our lives while we have the chance to.
The Literary Pen 