As humans, we judge ourselves by how others perceive us and seek to conform to an almost universally accepted, but still unspoken, code of ethics relating to the basic treatment of our fellow man. It is this inherent value that we place on others and expect others to attribute to us that make us different from animals and it is also what is missing to a large extent in Orwell’s “1984” and Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”. The futility of relationships in these works is part of what makes the worlds in which they are based seem so bereft of hope and consequently, dystopic in nature. Never Let Me Go is a supreme dystopian example of a modern day 1984 because the authors give hope to the characters and the audience, they both have an intrinsic human emotion to hold on to, and the people’s future isn’t clearly explained.
The vision of humanity’s future, the only truly acceptable thing to ‘love’ is Big Brother. The Party restricts all other love so as to break down the ties between family, friends and lovers whilst transferring this loyalty to the Party itself as a form of control. The Party is said to have, “cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and women.” This does not just show the breakdown of relationships, but the reduction of the self. The Party is removing the essential links that allow humanity to be more than a collective of individuals and instead uses this to its own ends, although what these are, beyond a desire for control, we never truly discover. It is partly this lack of knowledge of the Party’s overall goals that makes the situation seem so desperate, it is as though love is being removed without explanation or justification, making the whole process seem devoid of hope as there is no specific element against which to rebel. A similar lack of knowledge also plagues the children of Hailsham in “Never Let Me