never let me go thesis pdf

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Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Making meaning : death, dignity, and dasein in kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go.

Angel Katrina Tuohy , Montclair State University

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Document type, degree name.

Master of Arts (MA)

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College of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Thesis sponsor/dissertation chair/project chair.

Jonathan Greenberg

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Jeffrey Gonzalez

Jeffrey Miller

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , with a focus on the way the novel considers large questions concerning the “meaning” of human life and the nature of “human condition” as Ishiguro calls it in interviews discussing his novel, using language and terminology provided by phenomenologist and philosopher Martin Heidegger in his seminal work Being and Time. This thesis builds on these questions to consider the complex ways that the concept of “dignity” as shown through the experiences of clones who have socially predetermined lifespans complicates issues surrounding the inevitability of death, the uncanniness of clones and organ donation, and the reluctance to resist circumstances that cannot be changed. Ultimately, the novel provides a way of approaching a kind of bittersweet hopefulness in moving towards death, despite the crushing weight of its, and our, unalterable circumstances.

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Tuohy, Angel Katrina, "Making Meaning : Death, Dignity, and Dasein in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go" (2020). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects . 332. https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/332

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Personhood: Fukuyama’s Caveats and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Together, fiction and rhetoric not only illustrate grim possibilities, but also the processes and rationale by which they occur. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005) documents the lives of cloned children in twentieth century England whose sole purpose is to provide organs to keep their human predecessors alive. While the children mature to become donors or caregivers to peers undergoing donation, nothing exempts them from death following repeated organ harvesting. However unnerving, the novel tells of potential realities associated with genetic engineering, a trend bioconservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses in his work Our Post Human Future . This article endeavors to present Never Let Me Go as a fictional, yet appropriate supplement to Fukuyama’s writing, incorporating new historicism and accentuating Fukuyama’s points of caution in Ishiguro’s novel. Through dissecting and discerning the complementary relationship of the two works, reade...

Related Papers

Global Social Sciences Review

Ahmad Naeem

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Never) exposes the oppressive role of ideology in imploding human identity through societal training, education, and the social roles of clones in the human world. Cloning is another marvel of biotechnology which has given birth to many optimistic as well as pessimistic narratives. The post human narrative is central to dystopia as it tends to put forward the regressive use of biotechnology that has the potential to disrupt the essential human identity and implement a sort of reduction-ism which manifest gratification and conformity. The desire to indoctrinate conformity indicates the late capitalistic tactics of commodification which results in an identity implosion. The paper asserts that ideological maneuvering and construction of imploded identities are exhibited through dystopian bio-technologies in the agency of post humanism, which represent com-modified identity politics. The post human, in this context, serves as the Other of stratified human ide...

Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science. A 2 Volume Set. DQR Studies in Literature 47. Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani and C.C. Barfoot. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011. 379-94.

Rosario Arias

Journal of Contemporary Philology, Ss Cyril and Methodius University, B Koneski Faculty of Philology

Kalina Maleska

This article explores and aims to identify and foreground the dystopian aspects of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go in the context of identity, memory and lack of resistance. Various issues have been raised in previous research in regard to this novel, such as: how the narrator’s memory is related to her identity, why don’t the clones show any sign of opposition to the situation they are in, does the ending provide an optimistic view of the world. The utopian elements of Never Let Me Go, however, have not been much discussed. The objective here is to place Ishiguro’s novel in the context of the utopian tradition, since such an approach will provide new perceptions about the above-mentioned questions. The research will show how the novel’s dystopian elements are helpful in understanding the nature of the clones, their identity and memory.

Journal of Gender Studies

Rachel Carroll

Iris Vidmar Jovanović

This paper is intended as a contribution to the ongoing discussion within philosophy of film and literature regarding the extent to which film and literary works can be a medium for raising philosophical concerns. It focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and it analyzes the story with reference to its dual nature, humanistic and bioethical. The main assumption is that both, novel and film, are philosophically rich in addressing some of the most fundamental concerns about the very nature of who we are as human beings, though the conclusions one reaches on these issues might vary due to the differences between the novel and the film. Given the depiction of artificially created people, the story challenges the boundaries of our biological identity once it is liable to scientific modifications. The paper argues that Ishiguro's story, though not primarily intended to asking these questions, nevertheless confronts us with the need to think about philosophical aspects and implications of science that lies behind the doors of Hailsham community. The need for such an analysis is all the more pressing, given that scientific and technological achievements at our disposal today make it possible for Ishiguro's dystopia to become our reality tomorrow.

Anaise Irvine, PhD

Genetic technologies are now sufficiently advanced to alter the human genome. Indeed, gene editing is already practiced in some countries for medical purposes. However, future directions for the use of genetic technologies are unclear. Scholars of the “posthuman” future tend to speculate that genetic engineering (and other technologies) will create superhumans, and the term “human enhancement” is used to describe the practice of “improving” the human form. However, recent fiction on bioengineering themes envisages not a programme of enhancement, but rather the creation of a new genetic class system in which cloned or engineered human-like organisms form an oppressed and abused minority. These organisms – which I term genetic posthumans – have emerged as protagonists in numerous novels and films, allowing for a humanising view of the interiority of the cloned or engineered mind. This humanised mind is then juxtaposed to the genetic posthuman’s othered status. In order to establish the alterity of the genetic posthuman, storytellers strategically recycle modes of dehumanisation applied in historical race- or gender-based struggles. In each case, genetic posthumans are described in a manner recalling other oppressed outgroups: they are made secondary to unaltered humans, they are economically exploited, and they are treated as animals despite their evident humanness. This primes audiences to accept the purported differences of the genetic posthuman as social constructions rather than “natural” or biologically innate distinctions. This thesis proposes that contemporary genetic engineering fictions act as a corrective to the assumptions of posthumanist theory by positioning genetic posthuman characters as disadvantaged beings, using forms of dehumanisation made familiar by recent history. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) are examined as key examples of fiction in this area. Other novels, plays, and films are also analysed, including George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971); Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976); Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May (1989); Michael Marshall Smith’s Spares (1996); Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002); and Michael Bay’s The Island (2005). Each of these works contests the posthumanist assumption that genetic technologies will be used to improve the human form. Although human enhancement is a possible outcome of genetic engineering, these storytellers imply another scenario: that corporatized science could lead to the creation of economically useful, animalised, dehumanised creatures. These genetic posthumans could have human (or human-like) bodies and minds, but not human rights.

Taylor and Francis

Zahra Jannessari Ladani زهرا جان نثاری لادانی

Dealing with the in-vitro creation of human beings, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Kazuo lshiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) share the dystopian tradition, holding a catastrophic view of a technocratic society in a future in which humanity is depicted to be in a state of crisis. This article aims to examine the above-mentioned novels in terms of posthumanism, focusing on one of the well-known theorists of this field, Francis Fukuyama, who in Our Posthuman Future treats posthumanism as a threat to humanistic values. Fukuyama warns against a posthuman future in which technology will give us the capacity to modify the essence of human nature gradually, over time. The focus of this article will be on “Factor X”, a concept introduced by Fukuyama, and the ways in which the characters of the novels possess it, or come into its possession. The ways in which Fukuyama's pathways to a posthuman world are realised in the dystopian worlds that Huxley and lshiguro create, are also discussed.

Jimena Escudero Pérez

Brian Willems

Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go tells the story of a number of students growing up in a boarding school in England and eventually coming to grips with their destinies, with what they are supposed to do in life. What is both tragic and radically engaging in this novel is that the students are actually clones who will have their organs harvested for the "normals" of Britain. In this first book-length study of the influential novel, Brian Willems sets the work of Ishiguro in a new philosophical key. Analyzing the ramifications the story has for thought on death, poverty and the uncanny doubling of clones, Willems shows how a shakey rational awareness of the world usually ascribed to those considered other-than-human is actually what is most fundamental about "humanity" itself. The conjunction of such critical avenues makes Ishiguro's novel essential reading, giving it a currency that resonates not only in literary circles but also in those of law, philosophy and science, as well as instigating a film adaptation. By delineating the weak ontological differences between the humans and clones in the novel, Willems argues for a renewal of the poverty-of-self we tend to forget is a large part of what we always are. Brian Willems teaches literature and film theory at the University of Split, Croatia. He holds a doctorate in Media and Communication from the European Graduate School and is the author of Hopkins and Heidegger.

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Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

Moral Theories and Cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

• Petrillo, Stephanie

Published Web Location

In this paper I will consider the ethics of cloning as it occurs in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go from the standpoint of a number of moral theories – consequentialism, natural law theory, Kantian moral theory, rights based theory, and virtue ethics. In light of the moral theories, I will develop an analysis for why cloning-for-biomedical-research as outlined in the 2002 document Human Cloning and Human Dignity by the President’s Council on Bioethics is morally permissible, while the cloning-based donation program in the novel is morally impermissible.

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