Never let me go: themes of mortality and loss

¶ … carer" and "donation" mean in this novel is revealed slowly. The way the characters treat these words and various other ideas in the course of the novel suggests to the reader that something is wrong behind the normal world that is shown, though it is not clear for most of the novel what that might be. It is only when the purpose of the three central characters in particular is revealed that the reader can see what "carer" and "donation" really mean and that what we would take to be a voluntary aspect to both words is not voluntary in this case.

Kathy might be assuming that people she is speaking to would have some sort of reaction to Hailsham because they admire it as she has been raised to do. They might in fact know more about it than she does, but she cannot really now this. Kathy assumes much not just about the people she is talking to but about Hailsham itself. What she says to people really shows how much she has accepted and adopted as necessary reality what she has been taught from childhood.

3. Kathy needs to learn more about the other people from Hailsham to reaffirm her trust in what she has been told, that she and her friends were lucky to have been raised at Hailsham because there are other places of a similar nature that are operated much worse and where the treatment of the children is not as good. Of course, the irony of how lucky they were becomes more evident as the reader learns their fate and why they were raised in this place at all. Hailsham has means something to these children that no one can take away, and this is said after Kathy has an understanding of what the other places with the same purpose are like and why Hailsham was different.

4. Art is used by the administrators at Hailsham in a rather complicated way. Art is not really valued in society as it should be even today, and yet art is an activity that requires a good deal of effort and concentration. Art is used by the administrators as something harmless that can occupy the children and keep them away from more dangerous pursuits, either to themselves (since their health is so important) or to others (a concern raised since the time of the Morningdale scandal. Also, art is used as a false hope, for Tommy and Ruth have heard that a good showing in at could mean a deferral, though this is not true.

5. Adolescents as a rule tend to seek to be more like the other members of his or her group in order not to be excluded. The society to which adolescents usually conform is also usually different fro what their parents want and so is a form of rebellion at the same time. At Hailsham, the children are made to watch over one another as part of the program to keep them safe and healthy. It is also part of the means of control over them. The Hailsham students conform to what their elders want more than to any adolescent social order.

6. Maame and Miss Emily react to the request for a deferral by showing regret that the rumor has surfaced again and that they have to point out that there is no deferral and never has been. Miss Emily sees her work as beneficial bacuse the children have good lives and are educated and cultured, but she also reveals that she believes they have no souls, which makes her statement about "educated and cultured" seem hollow, as if they were not really educated and cultured but only trained like animals. In fact, during this whole conversation, she is detached from them as human beings and more interested in how the men will get the cabinet out of the building. What she says colors everything that has gone before in the story, explaining much and changing the meaning of much more.

7. Tommy draws animals because he likes animals, and he may also feel a certain sympathy for them because at some level he knows he is viewed as only another animal as well. He works on his art in part to gain a deferral, but he also has a talent and a need to express himself that continues even after he knows that there is no deferral.

8. Kathy likes the song "Songs after Dark" by Judy Bridgewater. When she sees Madame watching her while she is dancing to it, she imagines that Madame can read her mind and see that she is thinking about the woman with a baby and how that baby will cling to its mother. Madame later says that was not what she was thinking at all, that she was thinking about Kathy as a representative of the brave new world being created and about the virtues of the old world now being lost.

9. What Kathy says to Tommy does not necessarily mean that she herself did not know, but it shows that she thought he did not. Now, she thinks it possible he did and that she failed to see that he did. All of the children are perceptive to a degree, though they cling to hope in the form of rumors that would mean they were wrong. They want to be wrong and want the deferral to be real.

10. The novel does not offer a direct analysis of the medical ethics involved, but the reader is certain to sympathize with the children and to see them as victims. This implies that the world has given up on medical ethics in order to justify this type of medical procedure. Any ethics are addressed by the assumption that these children have no souls, as if such a statement could justify the treatment they are given in this alternate world. In our world, we have not made this choice, but the author implies that we might and suggests that we may be coming close to it as new medical procedures are developed and if we ever come to accept human cloning.

11. Miss Emily's argument is not valid at all. It is a form of self-justification that may make her feel better about what she is doing, but it has no basis in reality. Childhood is a time that leads to a future, and these children have no future. They are instead in a perpetual childhood that leads to nothing but sacrifice, whether they want to sacrifice or not. They have no choice, which is also why Miss Emily's argument is not valid.

12. It is not surprising that Miss Emily says she feels revulsion for the children at Hailsham. She believes they have no souls, and so they look human but are not human in her eyes. She and Madame are not behaving in the way true caregivers and teachers would be expected to behave toward other human beings, and even as Miss Emily says that these children have no souls, on some level she knows that what she is doing is wrong.

13. If there are any mechanisms in place in this society for tracking down those who run away, the fact is not indicated in the novel. Instead, the author shows the real horror of the situation in that the victims are themselves part of the process and really have no understanding of what freedom and a normal life would mean.

14. Kathy in this final paragraph shows why she and the others never tried to leave. They view the world like the field, enclosed and protected, and while she could cross the fence, she does not. Instead, she sees everything in her life as inevitable, and no matter how much other debris passes through that life, the central fact remains the same. She drives off to where she is supposed to be, for that is all she knows or has.

15. The way these children find their place in the world differs from how other people do so in that the children have no choice about the larger things they might do in life. Their fate has been decided for them. They still try to make sense of their lives, but more and more they can see what sense their lives make even if they would prefer not to believe it.

A dystopian society is a utopian society that does not work and does not serve the interests of the majority of its population. The word "utopia" can have a specific meaning or a broader meaning. A utopia is a society that offers a perfect form of government, at least according to the individual who has developed it. Sir Thomas More, also known as Saint Thomas More (because of sanctification by the Catholic Church), is probably best known for his confrontation with King Henry VIII, for which he lost his life. He was a statesman as well as a political and social philosopher. His most famous work is his Utopia, a book in which he created his version of a perfect society and gave his name to such conceptions ever after as "utopias." The word is of Greek origin, a play on the Greek word eutopos, meaning "good place." In the book, More describes a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are governed entirely by reason. The order and dignity of the state in this book contrasted sharply with the reality of statecraft in Christian Europe at the time, a region divided by self-interest and greed for power and riches. The book was also an expression of More's form of Humanism (Maynard 41). The term can also have broader application as a reference to any plans of government or schemes for social improvement which present the possibilities of a good society.

The society depicted in Never Let Me Go can be seen as a utopia for some and a dystopia for others, and an objective analysis would find it to be a dystopia because it does not serve the needs of anyone in certain ways. For the majority of the population, of course, this is a society that offers a good life and that also promises major medical possibilities, including the possibility of the replacement of organs on a grand scale so that lifelong health can be assured and so that life can even be much prolonged for those with a clone. For the clones, of course, this is clearly a dystopian society that gives these individuals no choice, that curtails their life for the benefit of others, and that is structure on a questionable moral position. Indeed, this last point is what makes this a dystopian society to an objective observer, for everyone in the society is guilty of immoral behavior by the act of creating these clones and then treating them as they do even before they are harvested for organs.

The issue relates to our world in the ongoing debate over human cloning. The reality of cloning was made apparent with the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997. Prior to that, cloning had been confined to plant life and small organisms, and the cloning of any higher life form was in the realm of science fiction. As soon as a sheep was cloned, people became concerned about the possibility of human cloning and what that would mean, leading to a report from a council appointed by the President and to various comments on the ethical and moral implications of human cloning.

Reproductive cloning for human beings raises many concerns. Widespread use of cloning for any group would decrease the genetic diversity of the population, and cloning certainly reduces the genetic diversity even between a couple using this technology. The cloning of sheep shows this, for it produced individuals that were weaker and more subject to disease than the parent had been. Cloning would mean that the child produced would have only one parent, increasing the danger of any genetic abnormality and reducing the effect of combinations of genes as takes place in normal human reproduction. Certainly, this possibility would be harmful to the individual so produced and raises a number of ethical concerns when discussing the cloning of human beings.

Another disadvantage cited is the idea that the widespread use of cloning would contribute to the "breeding" of humans, making this easier and creating a variety of problems as a consequence. This possibility would raise the chance of trying to breed in or out certain traits, raising issues about how tall or how intelligent we would want our children to be. This technology could thus lead to designer children, which would also mean that when the technology did not work, such children might have to be eliminated or treated as unwanted.

Ishiguro has obviously taken certain ideas from these arguments and is reacting to them. He knows that human cloning may become possible even if it is not now, and he also knows that if people could clone a new body for organs in order to save their own lives, they might do so. He has also heard the arguments on both sides, and especially the arguments about the morality of human cloning. He pictures a society that has made the wrong choice and what this would mean primarily to the beings created for the satisfaction of the needs of the "human" population. For that population, a version of utopia has been created that has elements they might not like but which have been set apart so they do not have to see them. Schools like Hailsham are where a particular kind of business is done for the public, raising cloned children and preparing them for the time when they will be sacrificed for the needs of the "regular" population. As noted, this might seem a utopia to the larger population, but it is a dystopia because it carries with it a moral break that taints everyone.

This type of literature is often characterized as science fiction and really is a form of that genre. It is usually set in the future, but it can also be an alternate reality as is the case with this novel. The world shown is often one left after a disaster, though this is not the case with Never Let Me Go. Indeed, the fact that it is not makes it all the more relevant to our time because it is suggested that such a world could evolve naturally if we make the wrong choices. The disaster is those choices, not a bomb or war. The novel goes more to the heart of the ethical issues involved by not including some of the more common elements of dystopian literature, such as a lowr class living in reduced circumstances while the wealthy live better than ever. This book is not that sort of social statement and instead has both the victims and the victimizers living well as far as material things are concerned. Where they do not live the same lives is in the fact that the majority population lives normally while the clones have no future and know it. Their natural self-interest has been suppressed, while their sense of sacrifice and service to others has been enhanced. They have no choice in the matter and are not treated as if they have souls.