Why Hope If There’s None? Anonymous College

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Kathy’s discovery of her world occurs simultaneously with the readers’. Except for the beginning, the readers travel through the same journey of discovery, excitement, and then the steady erosion of hope as the students of Hailsham learn of their fate. Interestingly, their journey involves questions about the future just as the readers are learning about a potential future they may encounter. Thus, Ishiguro pushes the readers to empathize, not just sympathize, with the characters presented in the novel through hope of a normal life, or love, and of freedom. In this way, he challenges not only the usage of clones as organ donors, but the conflicting role of hope as well.

One element of the novel’s science-fiction nature that builds up hope for the reader is the accessibility of the world. The story begins with a date, “late 1990s” while the book itself was published in 2005. Thus, it presents a world that the readers are familiar with but then adds organ donors for the future. Furthermore, in the beginning of the novel, the readers are unaware that the characters are clones, and Hailsham is represented as a pleasant place just as it was for Kathy and Tommy. Thus Ishiguro isolated one...