The "Knowing" and "Unknowing" of Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, rather than establishing exposition at the beginning of the novel, instead chooses to create and flesh out his dystopian world through the very specific and unique voice of Kathy, herself a donor. This accomplishes two very important things: firstly, it constructs the illusion that the world is real and exists outside of the realm of the narrative, and secondly, it keeps the reader in the dark about specific details of the world because the narrator is assuming that they are well known facts, and thus does not need to exposit them. The dynamic between these two functions—the first giving the feeling of “knowing” and the second of “unknowing”—combine to create an altogether unique reading experience, wherein one is turning the page just as much to find out about the world as they are to continue the plot of the story.

Perhaps rather paradoxically, though, employing this method of storytelling actually makes the reader identify more with the characters and setting than they would had it all been laid out before them at the beginning; we’re treated like someone already “in the know,” a part of a group we’re just finding out about. We aren’t treated as an outsider looking in; we are an insider, and not only that, but an insider that Kathy is (for some reason or another) trusting her deepest feelings and secrets with. The casual insertion of terms like “donor,” “carer,” and “completion,” while inscrutable at first, serve to strengthen the in-group identity of the reader by implying that we already know what those words mean, so of course we don’t need further explanation.

While this could be alienating in some instances—dropping too many unknown terms or concepts can just confuse whoever is being communicated with—keeping the use of the terms rather sporadic and, more importantly, not integral to the plot staves that potential disconnect off. Readers are treated to domestic school-life scenes over and over again throughout the book—scenes that almost anyone can relate to in some form or another if they’ve ever been a child. If the book had chosen to base everything around the dystopian society in a more overt way, then this narrative method would have just hindered the comprehension of the story as a whole, because readers would be more focused on trying to figure out what the context of the plot is rather than the plot itself. As it is, creating a world populated with fundamentally “normal” people makes us forget that they’re not living in our world at all until another mention of “donations” crops up—and, even then, because we’re treated as part of the culture already, we are inclined to relate even more to the characters. I think Ishiguro balanced “knowing” and “unknowing” quite well in this book because, while I did have many questions about the world throughout my reading, he supplemented the dystopian for normalcy so often that it never hindered my understanding of the characters or even the world. We come to understand the world through the thoughts and opinions of the characters, in part because we are able to watch them lead nearly similar lives to our own. That way, by the end of the book, when all is revealed and we’re being forced to face more and more often the true future of donors, we’ve cultivated a relationship with them beyond their role in the alien dystopian society. This makes it all the more jarring when the truth comes out, and we feel it as donors would feel it, not the as the “normals” who caused it.