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What is Ruth's significance in Never Let Me Go?
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Ruth's significance lies in her complex personality and her role as a clone. She embodies the struggle between individuality and conformity, reflecting Ishiguro's commentary on societal pressures to emulate others. Her domineering yet anxious nature highlights her desire for acceptance and power, contrasting with Kathy and Tommy's coping skills. Ruth's character illustrates the dangers of losing one's identity in the pursuit of social acceptance, ultimately serving as a cautionary figure against conformity.
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 aware of the gravity of the situation. The Hailsham students, who largely live in their own world, can invest in the kinds of games and fantasies that children tend to take seriously.
Ruth does so more extensively than the others. Her initial interactions with Kathy show that she has a domineering personality but also suffers from extreme anxiety; these complementary features are made apparent by the extensive rules she imposes, her insistence on being right, and her excessive pride in allegedly being an adult’s favorite. While Kathy cannot fully understand why Ruth insists on taking charge, she goes along with her whims.
Similarly, as Kathy and Tommy grow closer, Ruth must intervene and make...
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Tommy her boyfriend—but ultimately her egotism disables her from sustaining that relationship. Even though Tom seems more of a misfit earlier in the novel, it becomes apparent that he and Kathy have developed adequate coping skills, but Ruth will never do so. Most of the other clones are probably have similar attitudes toward hers, while Kathy and Tommy make easier transitions. The author does not imply that Ruth’s high-strung nature influences her completing first, but she would have been ill-suited to become a carer.
I think that Ruth's function as a clone is significant to her characterization. Indeed, she functions as a clone, as one will be harvested for others. Yet, her entire being until the end of her life when she confesses her true motivations to Kathy, is to be a clone of others. She wishes to work in an office, an atmosphere where replication and duplication are part of the Status Quo. She wishes to wear nice clothes, again reflection of a copying mentality. She desires social acceptance and the power of moving from margin to center. Ruth recognizes that this can only be possible, if at all, through duplicating the patterns of powerful individuals. I tend to think that Ishiguro might be making a statement about how our desire to conform and homogenize that which is unique and distinct makes individuals clones in their own right, able to be taken advantage of and "harvested" by the will of those who we wish to emulate. In this light, Ruth's primary purpose is to represent the dangers and destruction of being a literal clone and also being one in spirit. It is here where she is in stark contrast to Kathy, whose distinctive caring nature does not dissipate regardless of her own condition of being. Ruth's function in the novel becomes significant as it shows the fundamental nature of wanting to be part of a group whose intentions are to use people as means to ends as opposed to ends in of themselves.