Forming Relationships Around Loss: Analysis of Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' and Moore's "Wings" Marianne Nahayo College

The familial relationships navigated in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Lorrie Moore’s Bark are non-traditional and complex. In Never Let Me Go, the reader is introduced to characters who are copies of other human beings, made specifically to be organ donors. They are children in an institution, Hailsham, which gives them an education and prepares them to go out into the world and give up their lives to save other people’s lives. They have no parents outside of the guardians at Hailsham and no siblings. So aside from the people they make connections with, they have no family outside of themselves and the precious little things they buy themselves at the monthly sales at Hailsham. In “Wings” from Moore’s Bark, the reader is again introduced to characters who have no family outside of themselves until they find other people to latch onto. What becomes clear to me about the familial bonds formed in both these texts is that they are formed between broken people who recognize each other’s pain and therefore seek solace in one another. The implication of this, I argue, is that there is no permanence, at least not physically, to the existence of these families and the characters are mostly left with just the memories of those they love...