Harvard Daniel Vorhaus

As we follow Kathy, Tommy, and the rest of their clone cohort from their early days at Hailsham to the “completion “of their lives, it is painfully obvious that these clones carry unique names, faces, and personalities. By the time Ishiguro lets us in on his dirty little secret—that society has created these children to serve as biological vessels intended to exist only long enough to reach maturity before their organs are harvested through forced donation. It is too late the as the clones have already established themselves as ordinary people. They laugh, cry, squabble, reconcile, grow old, and they ultimately fall in love. While Ishiguro’s tale has unmistakable air of science fiction to it, it is difficult for the reader to view it as. It should not be a surprise that society that view them as clones, are anything but normal.

Tommy and Kathy are every bit the intelligent, compassionate human beings that you and I are, exactly the sort of people that you would want to be friend. If they differ from the society surrounding them it is because of their society’s inability to conceive of them as anything more than “shadowy objects in test tubes”;not because of their conception in a laboratory. Despite this, even those that know them best remain afraid.

Review on Never Perspectives Marvin Mirsky growing practice of familial decisions to have an “extra child “for use as a source of organ transplants when needed for earlier or favoured children, has encouraged Ishiguro to imagine a time very near the present when society (Britain in Ishiguro’s case) will have a regular program for producing clones for the specific purpose of providing a ready supply of organs for transplant. To house, raise, and educate these clones, a chain of special exclusive boarding school–like residences has been established on relatively remote country estates. The “students” have been inculcated with the certainty that they are special, and that they are destined for a very special function in their 20s (and, for a few, their 30s),though what exactly that function will be is never clearly explained or articulated.

But the dominant tradition of the “human” is as a concept or being whose central characteristic is the existence of a “soul,” which Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines as “an entity which is regarded as being the immortal or spiritual part of the person and, though having no physical or material reality, is credited with the functions of thinking and willing, and hence determining all behaviour,” or “the moral or emotional nature of a human being.”

Whether clones have “souls, “in this view, will determine whether they are “human.”And if, as the novel strongly suggests, they indeed are human, then the breeding of a class of humans for use as a source of organ transplants must be seen as a socially organized and approved system of murder.

Article on Never Enraged Keith McDonald
It provides us with a window into a culture of genetic engineering and cloning technology in which people are exploited and killed by a state seeking the wider benefits of organ farming, a window that nevertheless reflects in part the decisions facing contemporary culture.

Although this horrifying practice is revealed as the narrative progresses, the text itself focuses on the everyday nature of the friendships and love affairs that grow in Hailsham, and the novel has a particularly subdued air rather than a spectacular take on the institutionalized cloning of individuals and their harvesting. In this sense, the novel also alternates from some of the generic tropes of much Science Fiction, which often takes place in an otherworldly or spectacular environment. The world we are presented with is disturbingly similar to our own, and crucially, the practice of harvesting has become a largely unspoken but widely recognized fact of life, drawing parallels with the everyday human injustices witnessed in contemporary culture.

The notion of childhood is often bound up in a register of nurturing, benevolence, and protection that can also reveal social injustices and discourses of power.
This is entirely relevant to Never Let Me Go, where the raising of children for the harvesting of organs has not only been conveniently marginalized in spatial terms to various schools, centers, and homes, but also internally normalized by the donors themselves, typified in the figure of Kathy H, who remains passively in the grip of her duty as a carer and donor, embodying the relentlessly bleak tone of the novel. This normalization is evident not least in the language that is used to describe the harvesting of the victim’s organs. The children (or captives) are described as “special” and “gifted” by their guardians (or wardens), and their murders are described as “completions,” a jarring reminder of their sole purpose in the eyes of society, and of the ways in which language can normalize atrocities deemed necessary in a given ideology.

While in Hailsham, the students willingly participate in a denial of both the outside world and their futures, and this acceptance of the fate that awaits the donors represents a death knell and a realization of the “special” nature of their lifespan.

For example, periodic “car boot” sales see outsiders donate unwanted items and paraphernalia to the students of Hailsham, and these unspectacular items are treasured and traded, forming part of the collections that the students see as linking them to a sophisticated outside world. Similarly, schoolyard pranks become elaborate plans, childish feuds become long-running dilemmas, and adolescent crushes become monumental affairs. This heightened sense of drama and emotion is of course part and parcel of the experience, the narrative unfolding of adulthood into childhood; however, the ramifications are altered in this case. The students of Hailsham remain trapped in a state of adolescence during their maturation into biological adulthood, unable, unschooled, and unprepared for any semblance of an adult or free existence. The narrator and the other students are unequipped and unwanted in mainstream society, and indeed seem to become more of a burden (or perhaps a guilty reminder) to the wider world, which remains much of a mystery to Kathy H. In these instances, the reader is left to make his or her own assumptions about this unseen world, which of course reminds us of our own as it is extrapolated from contemporary moral landscapes.
We see her tend to her lifelong friends Ruth and Tommy as they each go through surgery and partial recovery before eventual decline and death. The three attempt to negotiate a fitting end to their lives together at an accelerated rate, as their respective friendships and love affairs are torn apart by the wider social “responsibilities” that they exist to fulfill.

Bold and heroic, Kathy H’s passivity and acceptance of her lot is at times enraging. Some readers, will undoubtedly find heroism in her ability to recount her experiences in a world that goes so far as to disenfranchise her from the human mass, where she is reduced to a cog in a bioconsumerist culture.

Ishiguro invites us to abandon the veil of authenticity and bear witness to a memoir from another reality, an imagined past that could represent a real future, where Science Fiction again calls on our imaginations to act as a lens by which to scrutinize contemporary social dilemmas.