This is just a little taster of Jonathan Peel’s frankly suberb guide to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel ‘Never Let Me Go’. At over 40 pages, it should provide you with more than enough material to engage with in and out of class.
- NLMG Guide.pdf
We might start this document by considering the genre of the writing. Is it science-fiction? Or dystopian literature in which a parallel world is developed which focuses on negative stereotyping (the opposite of a Utopia - look them up, it’s part of learning!). Or is it something else again?
I argue that it is not science fiction despite its subject matter. Cloning has been treated before - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley being the obvious example, but Sci-Fi is interested in the mechanics of the issue and the story usually involves rebellion. Consider all such texts, from popular sci fi to more literary works such as 1984 (Orwell). In most cases dystopia meets sci-fi and all of them hinge on rebellion and the need to make a moral judgement.
They often utilise a first person narrative and we have the same here; but we will need to look at Kathy H. - and carefully. She speaks to us as though to an equal - consider the technical lexis used in the opening page: “carer”, “donation”, “donor”, “agitated”, and so on. We are clones and we understand her. Often the sense of dialogue is...
