NEVER LET ME GO

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go

Never Let me go- A Critical Review

Narrated by Kathy, Never Let Me Go is basically the story of a life-long friendship forged in childhood. Told in three 'acts', it begins in 1978 at Hailsham, a boarding school in rural England, where the happy, rosy-cheeked youngsters appear to be orphans.

It is hard to tell you what the novel is about without giving it away. The premise behindthe story is never revealed until half way through. We are told on the first page by Kath, thenarrator, that she is a “carer” and is on her way to becoming a “donor.” From there, Kath spendsmost of the novel looking back, telling us about her two closest, but equally tense, friendshipswith Ruth and Tommy. The world Kath describes is riddled with familiarity, but strangedifferences lurk in dark corners, and those differences become glaring-think like a surrealistpainting.

 Kathy, Ruth and Tommy start off in Hailsham, which we are told is a boarding school,but soon notice that it is a highly unconventional one. The teachers that run the school are called“Guardians,” and they are affectionate and nurturing, even caring, yet they exude a clinicalcoolness and distance. The students are ferociously encouraged to produce art and poetry-almostas if their life depends on it-but no energy is spent elsewhere. They are constantly told they arenot like other children, they are “special students of Hailsham.”

Little things about the way the students conduct their lives muddle our conventionsfurther. So many conversations between the characters happen outside, in nature, and neverbetween walls. The student's heads are always turned behind their shoulders, afraid of who mightcome and hear them, catch them in an act of deliberating, exploring or discussing. Their lives arethick with a tension and anguish they see but are not able to understand.

There is a haunting and disturbing layer to Never Let Me Go, yet it is not aware of itselfas such. The alternative reality Ishiguro imagines is treated as such a matter-of-fact thing thequestions a reader will have are simply dubbed as insignificant or meaningless. We are presentedwith a vocabulary that never explains itself, and acts as if it is known and understood truth; Atruth whose implications are brutal (Petrakis, 2010).

Discussion

This paper entails four major questions, which are as follows:

How does the language of attachment and loss shed light on what is valued or meaningful?

What causes them to seek knowledge at some times and to retreat from it at others?

How do the shifts in geography (physical places and descriptions of physical surroundings) reflect the shifts in a character's consciousness?

How does Kathy's tone over the course of the novel shed light on the nature and value of memory?

The following discussion would answer all the above questions. The novel is divided into three distinct parts combining the fate of three protagonists. The one at the school "Hailsham" (note that "Sham" means deception in English) that evokes childhood, the other to the cottage, which illustrates the transition ...