What are the people in this world thinking?

One thing that confused me about Never Let Me Go was the fact that the people of this fictional world see the farming of organs from clones as the best possible route for organ donation.  If science has advanced enough for it to be possible to create clones from so-called “possibles”, then shouldn’t scientists also be able to grow human organs in test tubes or petri dishes?  Doing so would achieve the same end goal, but without dealing with the huge moral issues (and the expenses of keeping who knows how many humans alive and healthy for around 30 years).

            Speaking of moral issues, wouldn’t the cloning of people in order to farm organs from them be discussed in the outside world?  Yes, characters like Madame, Miss Lucy, and Miss Emily know about it and have their own opinions, but what about other people?  There is the possibility that the government (or whoever runs this whole cloning business) has kept everything a secret, but people find out about everything.  And the clones end up being out and about in the world at some point (for example, Norfolk), so the chances of someone learning about the operation are fairly high.  Unless morals have changed to a near-unrecognizable degree (from today’s standards), then people would surely have problems with actual living humans being created and raised only to be killed for the sake of providing organs to other people.  If that world has vegans (which it probably does), then it’s sure that someone would be throwing a fit over this.  Yes, such a thing might not be shown in the novel, but it seems to be another strange plot-/world building-hole that Ishiguro has sidestepped.

            All in all, the fact that the people of this world are implied to be okay with the acts of cloning and “completion” is something that really bothers me.  I feel as if the social/political climate around the cloning operation is something that Ishiguro could have elaborated on at least a little bit, because it seems like there are too many gaps in logic for the complacency of the public to be plausible, even in such a fictional world.

Sex and art in "Never Let Me Go"

Kazuo Ishiguro wanted to explore the extent to which a person will refuse to run away from their fears with his novel "Never Let Me Go." If there's one thing nobody can run away from, it's death, so it makes sense that "Never Let Me Go" is a novel that explores the ways in which a person confronts death without fleeing from it.

Early on in the novel, we learn that the children at Hailsham live only to give their up their organs at the peak of their life and die. Grim stuff for readers, grimmer stuff for fictional children. But there's brainwashing afoot at Hailsham, and it seems expressly designed to make fatal organ donation a reasonable way to confront one's own fears of death. Dying young becomes a means of leaving behind a living legacy. Ironic, but this is literature, so what did you expect?

The best way that we know how to grapple with our imminent death is to try and create things that will live on after we pass away. Having children is the main way of doing this. But in "Never Let Me Go," the cloned children can't have kids. My interpretation is that having children would give the Hailsham gang a more enticing means of "life after death" than giving up their organs. The children are brainwashed to replace one greater purpose and genetic legacy for another.

But let's say you're the sort of person who wants to leave a legacy but doesn't want children. Art becomes another viable outlet. Art requires that you put something of yourself into a work with the hopes that that work will exist in the cultural conversation long after you're dead. Here's the weird thing; the Hailsham lot is encouraged to create art, even as they're unable to have children.

But they're encouraged to create art for a different reason than the one that, according to yours truly, keeps them from having children. While having children would give them a way to live beyond death that doesn't involve them selling their bodies (the oldest profession reinterpreted for the sci-fi crowd, ha!), art functions in a different way. In their various exchanges and references to Madame's gallery, art exists to help the children understand how to give something personal. Creating art and losing art is just training them for the big leagues.

The ways in which these two core ideas develop changes. As the children become teenagers, sex eventually replaces art, but never to the same extent; it's sex without children. The act without the creation. What's sex without children? Probably a question for someone smarter than I. My gut says, "just a lot of fun," but how much fun can you possibly have with a vital organ donation looming on the horizon? Maybe it's just for comfort.

Arachnophobia

As Kathy looks back fondly on her time at Hailsham, one of the first things she begins to question  about the practices that are upheld at the school is the concept of the Madame’s “Gallery.” Ever since they can remember, the students recall hearing about this “Gallery,” where all of their best work from their art classes were taken away to. Looking back, Kathy reflects on if any of them ever actually believed in the concept or reality of the Gallery. She recalls that the concept of the Gallery was never explicitly stated by any guardian, yet she realized how ingrained it was in their language at Hailsham, especially when they wanted to praise another student’s work they would say things like “Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!” (28). She remembers times when her peers would bring up the concept in class and knew that it was a taboo topic in front of guardians, much like a foul word (28).

While the students of Hailsham were uncertain about where their artwork was going and why it was such a taboo topic, Kathy describes that one thing they were always confident of was Madame paying several visits to Hailsham each year. One night at Hailsham a small group of Kathy’s friends were talking about Madame’s visits and the odd manner in which she interacts with the students. Kathy’s friend, Ruth, had the hypothesis that Madame was simply scared of the students at Hailsham. The girls argued back and forth and then planned a plan of attack to test Ruth’s hypothesis next time she dropped by. When the day finally came, they all gathered ready to execute. They planned on swarming around her upon her arrival and catching her off guard to see if she was actually scared of them. After they executed, the girls simply said “excuse me” and walked away. However, the girls weren’t exactly ready for the reaction they received. “It wasn’t even as though Madame did anything other than what we predicted she’d do: she just froze and waited for us to pass by… As she came to a halt, I glanced quickly at her face… And I can still see it now, the shudder she was suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her… Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders.” (32).

This was one of the first instances that the girls experienced growing up that made them feel truly different and like didn’t truly understand who they were or what their purpose was. Why did Madame want their work if she was scared of them? Looking back on these experiences and realizing why Madame’s reaction hurt them is apart of growing up. Kathy relates, “I’m sure at some point in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day… Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home” (32).

Humanity and Hailsham

Upon finishing the novel, I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene in which Kathy and Tommy question Madame and Miss Emily about deferrals and the gallery. Although I was confident that the couple wouldn’t receive these hopeful deferrals, I never suspected that the Hailsham guardians were attempting to prove the humanity of the students. When reflecting on it, I realized what surprised me most was Madame’s involvement in the process. Kathy’s descriptions of Madame throughout the story provide conflicting evidence on Madame’s opinions about the humanity of the Hailsham students, causing her intentions to be questionable.

One controversy in Madame’s involvement in Hailsham is the fact that she fears the children. When Ruth and Kathy’s gang create the theory that Madame fears the students, they jokingly decide to test the theory. Madame’s response, although not unexpected, unsettles the children. Kathy described the interaction, declaring, “I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade” (35). The evidence of their theory and Madame’s reactions contrasts with Madame’s intentions. If she’s working to prove the student’s humanity through their art, why would she be afraid of them? If she thought there was a cause worth supporting, she would believe that they were nothing short of human, so there would be no need to fear them.

While the fearful incident questions how Madame feels about the children, her reaction to Kathy dancing to “Never Let Me Go” shows another side of her. Kathy describes Madame’s silent but emotional reaction when she says, “She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream” (71). Contrary to Madame’s fear of the children, her emotional crying shows that she sees the humanity in the children. Later in the story, Madame explains to Kathy why she cried, and her response …. “I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was pleading, never to let her go” (271).  When she call’s Kathy a “little girl,” it emphasizes the humanity that Madame sees.

Madame’s conflicting responses call to question an internal struggle within her. Although Miss Emily declares that Madame has always been on the student’s side, does she truly believe in the humanity of the Hailsham students? Perhaps she saw the students as humans but struggled to protest against the nation’s opinions. Perhaps Madame only used Hailsham to convince herself that she bettered the lives of clones.  Perhaps their humanity meant something more than she could explain, and their existence impacted her in an indescribable yet profound manner.

The Future of Organ Donations

While reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, it is very difficult not to draw parallels between the world he creates and the world that we live in. While this seems to be the Ishiguro’s intention in writing Never Let Me Go, the concept of raising clones for the purpose of organ donations does not seem like too big of a leap from our current circumstances. An interesting question was raised that with the advent of autonomous vehicles, the number of car accidents will drop significantly. Without car accidents the main source of organ donations will be lost, and demand for organs will skyrocket. We frequently see in human history the negative power of rhetoric and societal norms; Hitler and the Holocaust, or the Crusades, or what is happening right now in North Korea. It is not uncommon for terrible ideas to spread and become normal among society, and as such I see the possibility of our world becoming similar to Ishiguro’s at some in the future.

Towards the end of the novel, Miss Emily tells Kathy and Tommy that most people did not consider clones to be humans, “we took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all" (Ishiguro 260). They took away their artwork at a young age in an attempt to highlight the human qualities of the clones and to prove that they had a soul just like normal people because most people did not think they were. This seems very similar to the mindset that many Nazi soldiers had towards the Jewish people. They did not see them as people, and so they felt okay with the actions they were committing. Likewise, I think that the normal people in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go did not consider the clones to be human and so felt okay killing them to take their organs. This book is terrifying simply because of the obvious similarities between our own society and theirs. With autonomous vehicles, the demand for organs will rise and questions will start to be asked about where the new organ donations will come from. If we aren’t able to successfully grow new organs in labs or in other animals, I fear that an idea very similar to Never Let Me Go could be suggested. That we simply grow our organs in a clone of ourselves, and we will “complete” them when a real person needs an organ.

Miss Lucy

            Miss Lucy is a character in Never Let Me Go that is the character with the most normal human characteristics, and she is the most relatable teacher at Hailsham. Instead of just acting like the kids were normal and everything was fine, though she tried, certain bits of information were given to the students, particularly Tommy and Kathy. I think there was a distinct difference between Miss Lucy at the beginning of the novel until the point where she leaves Hailsham at the end of part one. She was the only one who tried to make Tommy feel better about his lack of artistic ability that is shown by this quote, “If Tommy had genuinely tried, she was saying, but he just couldn’t be very creative, then that was quite all right, and he wasn’t to worry about it” (27-28). Her opinion later changes drastically because Tommy tells Kathy, “That she’d done me a big disservice telling me not to worry about being creative” (108). I think the toll of working with these children whom she knows will die and not live full lives has started to take effect. She no longer has the patience or ability to keep vital information about what is really in store for the Hailsham students to herself. Most of the students did not pick up on the hints she dropped about the real world and what was important, they just took her words as part of another lecture. Tommy and Kathy are different because they had picked up on the fact that there was something different about Miss Lucy early on and had been observing her for quite some time. This is why when she says things like “you were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them have been decided” they looked for the deeper meaning of her words.

            In my opinion Miss Lucy is most relatable because if I were in her position I think that I would have acted similarly. Knowing that these kids were going to have short lives and that the purpose of their lives was to donate their vital organs would make an impact on me. Like her I would probably be angry with the system for not telling the kids what was actually going to happen and why their art was important. Anyone who is holding everything in like Miss Lucy and being faced with oblivious students every day would surely hit their breaking point at some time. She is not like the other teachers who are able to distance themselves from it, and that is why she is most relatable because she reacts how one could imagine themselves reacting. She had a clear impact on her students because they were heartbroken when “Miss Emily had broken off from talking about Beethoven and announced that Miss Lucy had left Hailsham and wouldn’t be returning” (111). The weight of responsibility and inability to tell the students the truth finally got the best of her and she had to leave her role as a teacher at Hailsham.