Some of the key dystopian elements in Never Let Me Go are lack of individualism (with the corollary of lack of choice), the prevalence of illness, and the failure of the educational system.

A dystopia is a society that has deviated from its utopian aspirations, turning the positive features into negative ones. The people who control England in the future, as Kazuo Ishiguro depicts it, see themselves as individuals; each of them makes a choice to have clones created so that they have a supply of body parts to replace theirs when the parts fail. In order to achieve these perfect individual matches, however, each person must duplicate themself and could conceivably create multiple copies. Their very effort to maintain their own individuality has been doomed through this exact replication.

For the clones, the lack of individualism extends to their lack of choice. As their originals do not consider them human, they have no say in what will become of them. The choices that the original humans make about prolonging their lives are not available to the clones, who are utterly at the mercy of those who created them. Even the rumors of options, such as living in couples, turn out to be lies.

The powers that be had decided that they could ameliorate the damage of the clones’ impending demise by raising them with a positive environment, including such features as art education. This system is a strongly dystopian element because it is based on hypocrisy. Art depends on the artist’s internal searching so that they can express important truths about the human condition. For the clones, who have no knowledge of how society actually functions, what passes for art is a travesty of creativity. Their education ultimately consists of learning that everyone has lied to them.

I would argue that one of the chief dystopian elements, common to many dystopian classics, is the question of identity and what it is to be human. The clones show themselves to be identical to humans: they are able to love, dream and are physically the same. Yet they live in a society that has created them and given them life solely for the purpose of taking and harvesting their organs to give life to "real" humans. In this world that they live in they are looked down upon and regarded as a kind of sub-human species. The question of what is humanity and how do we define humans and separate them from such imitations abounds, and, just as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the answers are rather unsettling.

Together with the issue of humanity, another topic that rears its ugly head in this excellent novel is that of rights and control. The clones live in a very tightly-controlled world. No mention is made of any clones ever trying to rebel against their lot. Although there are rumours of extra time that can be won, it is just extra time, not life, and these rumours are shown to be false in the novel anyway. Clones are created and brought up to serve one purpose: to give their organs until they die. As such, their existence is pitiful and short. They are used and abused by humans.