Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro [126]
ALSO BY KAZUO ISHIGURO
A Pale View of Hills
An Artist of the Floating World
The Remains of the Day
The Unconsoled
When We Were Orphans
NEVER LET ME GO READER’S GUIDE
The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We hope they will aid your understanding of this devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.
Why is it important for Kathy to seek out donors who are “from the past,” “people from Hailsham”? She learns from a donor who’d grown up at an awful place in Dorset that she and her friends at Hailsham had been really “lucky”. How does the irony of this designation grow as the novel goes on? What does Hailsham represent for Kathy, and why does she say at the end that Hailsham is “something no one can take away”?
Kathy’s narration is the key to the novel’s disquieting effect. First person narration establishes a kind of intimacy between narrator and reader. What is it like having direct access to Kathy’s mind and feelings? How would the novel be different if narrated from Tommy’s point of view, or Ruth’s, or Miss Emily’s?
What are some of Ruth’s most striking character traits? How might her social behavior, at Hailsham and later at the Cottages, be explained? Why does she seek her “possible” so earnestly?
One of the most notable aspects of life at Hailsham is the power of the group. Students watch each other carefully and try on different poses, attitudes, and ways of speaking. Is this behavior typical of most adolescents, or is there something different about the way the students at Hailsham seek to conform?
How do Madame and Miss Emily react to Kathy and Tommy when they come to request a deferral? Defending her work at Hailsham, Miss Emily says, “Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured”. What is revealed in this extended conversation, and how do these revelations affect your experience of the story?
After their visit to Miss Emily and Madame, Kathy tells Tommy that his fits of rage might be explained by the fact that “at some level you always knew”. Does this imply that Kathy didn’t? Does it imply that Tommy is more perceptive than Kathy?
The teacher Lucy Wainright wanted to make the children more aware of the future that awaited them. Miss Emily believed that in hiding the truth, “We were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you…. Sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you…. But…we gave you your childhoods”. In the context of the story as a whole, is this a valid argument?
Some reviewers have expressed surprise that Kathy, Tommy, and their friends never try to escape their ultimate fate. They cling to the possibility of deferral, but never attempt to vanish into the world of freedom that they view from a distance. Why might Ishiguro have chosen to present them as fully resigned to their early deaths?
Reread the novel’s final paragraph, in which Kathy describes a flat, windswept field with a barbed wire fence “where all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled.” She imagines Tommy appearing here in “the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up”. What does the final sentence indicate about Kathy’s state of mind as she faces her losses and her own death?
Does the novel examine the possibility of human cloning as a legitimate question for medical ethics, or does it demonstrate that the human costs of cloning are morally repellent, and therefore impossible for science to pursue? What kind of moral and emotional responses does the novel provoke? If you extend the scope of the book’s critique, what are its implications for our own society?
In an interview, Ishiguro talked about Never Let Me Go: “There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend