Never Let Me Go

Miss Lucy is teaching a poetry lesson to her English class and the topic of conversation falls on soldiers held in World War 2 prison camps. "One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps...

Never Let Me Go is saturated in a mood of melancholic sadness. Kathy H. and her two close friends Tommy and Ruth know their lives will be fleeting and filled with pain at the end. They are clones,...

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, a dominant system of exploitation prevails in a world where clones are raised for the sole value of their harvestable organs. The narrative follows...

Two central motifs in Never Let Me Go are art and music. In navigating themes of death, innocence, and eternal recurrence, Ishiguro illustrates how creativity embodies the practice of the soul...

In Never Let Me Go, Lucy embarks on a crusade for social reform. She understands that the clone children are being treated as sets of body parts rather than as human beings, which she finds...

From the point of view of many readers, growing up at Hailsham has a negative effect on Kathy and many of her peers. For example, they all live in fear of their keepers and of the environment in...

Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go can be interpreted as a warning, demonstrating to readers that the technological advancements around human life are not without complex ethical and moral issues....

The Cottages are on an old farm and they're often cold and in disrepair. The clones have unrestricted television time and are allowed to take short trips. The center of the Cottages is a farmhouse...

Keffers turns up in his muddy van two or three times a week to look the Cottages over. He doesn't talk to the students much; he simply sighs and shakes his head at what he clearly thinks is their...

While the specific subject of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is cloning, the characters’ experiences and relationships lead the reader to a more basic question about what constitutes human identity. The...

Miss Emily and Madame share the belief that art reveals the soul of the artist. If the clone's art might be seen as soul revealing, then it could be argued that the clones have souls. If it might...

Both novels contain elements of speculative fiction. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go both explore various themes through characters that do not exist in the real...

The idea of a “possible,” the person who had been the original on which a clone was based, intrigues the clone characters who populate Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, but they generally keep their interest...

The transition from part 1 to part 2 of the novel marks the end of Kathy’s childhood and her upbringing in the narrow confines of Hailsham. Along with Tommy and Ruth, she goes to live with a group...

In the novel, the two main female characters are Kathy and Ruth. For both characters, the phrase "never let me go" means different things. For Kathy (especially in her adult years), the phrase is a...

In the most literal of senses, I don't sense that there is much of a choice. Ishiguro establishes the donor condition in the novel as one in which accepting one's fate is to face destruction in...

The entire premise of Ishiguro's narrator's life (and the lives of her friends and classmates) is based on lies and deceit. Kathy, the narrator, is part of a group of young people who are basically...

This is a big question, one that drives a lot of the novel's tension. First of all, if you haven't already done so, you should definitely read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go because it is a beautiful,...

The Cottages are an appropriate setting for the harvesting of the clones' organs as they have been converted from old farm-buildings. Back in the day, the farm would have been used for the...

One way that Ishiguro is able to use Tommy to explore ideas of love and loss is in how Tommy strives to find hope in both. Ishiguro constructs Tommy as highly optimistic. He strives for the...

The donors in Never Let Me Go know that they will most likely die after their third or fourth donation, but they have been conditioned since early childhood to accept this fate as natural. Even the...

Throughout Never Let Me Go, Kathy is an appealing protagonist whose predicament stimulates the reader’s empathy. As she reflects on her life and those of her fellow clones, including her closest...

Setting and time are at the core of chapter 14 of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The chapter takes place in Norfolk, England, where the main characters—Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—go searching for Ruth's...

We're looking for evidence of brainwashing, or indoctrination: quotes that show how the authority figures (or maybe even peers) in Kathy's world have "programmed" her or others to believe or accept...

Ishiguro explores loss, power structures, and human dignity amid restrictive social setting. In Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, we see the theme of duty also receiving a significant focus....

Tommy is presented as one of life's outsiders, a chronic misfit who doesn't really belong anywhere. By showing Tommy as a victim of merciless teasing and mockery, Ishiguro makes him a sympathetic...

The children who live in Hailsham believe they are receiving an education, but in reality they are basically prisoners who are deprived of most information about the world beyond its grounds. Many...

There's a good deal of animal imagery in Never Let Me Go. One has only to think of Tommy's elephant drawing or his drawings of imaginary animals at the Cottages. Then there's Kathy's comparison of...

One of the most defining characteristics about Kathy as a charater and how she develops from childhood to adulthood is the way in which she becomes more and more accepting of her lot in life and...

The massive restriction that the central characters face as clones is that they are not free to live their lives as they would like and that they do not have ultimate control over their futures....

In The Ladies' Paradise by Emile Zola, there are two hugely key characters to know about. The first is Denise Baudu, a young woman who travels to Paris and starts working in a department store. She...

The defining feature of capitalism is that the factors of production are owned by private entities as opposed to the government. Capitalism encourages greed and self-interest. It incentives its...

Though we come to know protagonist Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy as real, feeling people, the story unfolds to reveal the strange lives they live as not-quite people. Kathy and her friends...

This is one of the most tragic points in the novel, in my opinion. Let us not forget the context of this trip to revisit Madame. They believe that Madame and their former headmistress is able to...

The major connection between these two texts comes in the way that both Kathy and Gogol, as the protagonists of the two novels, have to move towards acceptance and discovery of their true identity....

The issue that the adults and the children confronted in different ways was when and how the clone children would be prepared for their ultimate purpose. It can be argued that the point at which a...

Each of the clones must confront their own future in their own way, and much depends on their personality, which is that of the original from whom they were cloned. As children, they are not fully...

The clones don't think of escaping for the simple reason that this is not really a novel about clones or bioethics. The point is that we just do. All of us. Most of us are not even aware that of...

Ruth has an expressive, dominant personality that comes out throughout the novel. Kathy is passive, the follower of the pair, and defers to Ruth's leadership at every turn. We're introduced to...

I think there are a number of different strategies that Ishiguro uses in this wonderful book. Firstly, we can see that the central strategy he uses is raising our curiosity about these seemingly...

We receive a full description of Chrissie and Rodney in Chapter 12 of this poignant novel. They are a couple who Kathy and her friends meet when they leave Hailsham and go to the Cottages, which...

The idea of having a future apart from donation, possible service as a carer, and then completion is not encouraged by the Hailsham teachers and administrators. The children grow up with little...

I think that one way in which the students' conformity is fundamentally different is rooted in a fear of unknown. To an extent, perhaps Ishiguro is making a statement about all conformity rooting...

The reason behind putting so much emphasis on creativity is revealed later on in a discussion between Miss Emily, Marie-Claude, Tommy, and Kathy at around page 239. During this discussion, Miss...

From the beginning of the novel, Tommy is a character who is out of step with his Hailsham peers. In the early pages of the book, Ishiguro uses the character of Tommy to illustrate two ways a young...

The period in which Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel is set is not precisely specified. There are references to the cloning program dating back to the 1950s. The location is England. Cloning actually...