One reason I find Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro to be interesting is because it encourages us to reevaluate the world around us. Kathy and the other students at Hailsham feel something is different about their lives but they don’t seem to truly realize what it is or how it will effect them. They have been told about the donations, but in such a way that they don’t question them. In fact talking about the donations is almost taboo:
“we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory... we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us. But we didn’t really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us” (66 ebook). One would think that they would be anxious to learn more about the donations, about what will happen to them after Hailsham, and about why they are different from ‘normal’ people, but instead they avoid these topics out of “embarrassment”.
I find this to be similar to how people in the real world often avoid discussing political issues like climate change, corruption, and similar topics. We ‘know’ that climate change is having drastic affects on the world, but in our daily lives we rarely do anything about it or talk about it. We ‘know’ that districts are gerrymandered and that politicians are bought by large corporations, but we don’t even think about it in our day to day life. Issues like this have always been in the background of our lives so we tend to ignore them the same way Kathy and her friends ignore the donations.
To the reader, it seems that crazy that Kathy and the others go along with the donations, but I think that Ishiguro is trying to make the reader consider all of the things that they go along with in their daily lives that could be just as important to us someday as the donations are to the clones. By presenting a situation that is alarming to an outside observer, but completely normal to those involved, the book encourages us to reevaluate what we consider to be normal in our lives.
I agree that the clones’ reactions to the discussion of their own fates is similar to the topics you mentioned. Often the things that are treated as “taboo” subjects are the ones that we have very little, if any, control over. In the novel the students of Hailsham mention a theory that the things they are taught are “timed very carefully and deliberately … so that we were always just too young to understand properly” (82). Even if this is not the case for us, much of what we are taught about major issues are glazed over so that we never have a full understanding of them. Often, at least in my experience in the public schooling system, subjects like you mentioned, like climate change or politics, are discussed, but in such a broad and theoretical way that they are never allowed to sink in. I remember being taught about gerrymandering in high school history, but it was taught in hypothetical and historical terms, as though it was uncertain whether or not it was occurring today. I feel like the reason the students of Hailsham are so complacent in their fate is much the same reason that we are so complacent in these issues. It’s true that some of us try to fight back or at least have strong reactions, but that group is a relatively small portion of the populace. I agree with what you’re saying, that the book is encouraging us to rethink what we consider “normal” in our lives.
ReplyDelete