DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Never Let Me Go |
1. Kathy introduces herself as an experienced carer. She prides
herself on knowing how to keep her donors calm, “even before fourth
donation” [p. 3]. How long does it take for the meaning of such terms as
“donation,” “carer,” and “completed” to be fully revealed?
2. Kathy addresses us directly, with statements like “I don’t
know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we used to have some
form of medical every week” [p. 13], and she thinks that we too might
envy her having been at Hailsham [p. 4]. What does Kathy assume about
anyone she might be addressing, and why?
3. Why is it important for Kathy to seek out donors who are “from
the past,” “people from Hailsham” [p. 5]? She learns from a donor who’d
grown up at an awful place in Dorset that she and her friends at
Hailsham had been really “lucky” [p. 6]. How does the irony of this
designation grow as the novel goes on? What does Hailsham represent for
Kathy, and why does she say at the end that Hailsham is “something no
one can take away” [p. 287]?
4. Kathy tells the reader, “How you were regarded at Hailsham,
how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were
at ‘creating’” [p. 16]. What were Hailsham’s administrators trying to
achieve in attaching a high value to creativity?
5. Kathy’s narration is the key to the novel’s disquieting
effect. First person narration establishes a kind of intimacy between
narrator and reader. What is it like having direct access to Kathy’s
mind and feelings? How would the novel be different if narrated from
Tommy’s point of view, or Ruth’s, or Miss Emily’s?
6. What are some of Ruth’s most striking character traits? How
might her social behavior, at Hailsham and later at the Cottages, be
explained? Why does she seek her “possible” so earnestly [pp. 159–67]?
7. One of the most notable aspects of life at Hailsham is the
power of the group. Students watch each other carefully and try on
different poses, attitudes, and ways of speaking. Is this behavior
typical of most adolescents, or is there something different about the
way the students at Hailsham seek to conform?
8. How do Madame and Miss Emily react to Kathy and Tommy when
they come to request a deferral? Defending her work at Hailsham, Miss
Emily says, “Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re
educated and cultured” [p. 261]. What is revealed in this extended
conversation, and how do these revelations affect your experience of the
story?
9. Why does Tommy draw animals? Why does he continue to work on
them even after he learns that there will be no deferral?
10. Kathy reminds Madame of the scene in which Madame watched her
dancing to a song on her Judy Bridgewater tape. How is Kathy’s
interpretation of this event different from Madame’s? How else might it
be interpreted? Is the song’s title again recalled by the book’s final
pages [pp. 286–88]?
11. After their visit to Miss Emily and Madame, Kathy tells Tommy
that his fits of rage might be explained by the fact that “at some level
you always knew” [p. 275]. Does this imply that Kathy didn’t? Does it
imply that Tommy is more perceptive than Kathy?
12. Does the novel examine the possibility of human cloning as a
legitimate question for medical ethics, or does it demonstrate that the
human costs of cloning are morally repellent, and therefore impossible
for science to pursue? What kind of moral and emotional responses does
the novel provoke? If you extend the scope of the book’s critique, what
are its implications for our own society?
13. The novel takes place in “the late 1990s,” and a postwar
science boom has resulted in human cloning and the surgical harvesting
of organs to cure cancer and other diseases. In an interview with
January Magazine Ishiguro said that he is not interested in realism.* In
spite of the novel’s fictitious premise, however, how “realistically”
does Never
Let Me Go reflect the world we live in, where scientific
advancement can be seemingly irresistible?
14. The teacher Lucy Wainright wanted to make the children more
aware of the future that awaited them. Miss Emily believed that in
hiding the truth, “We were able to give you something, something which
even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that
principally by sheltering you. . . . Sometimes that meant we kept things
from you, lied to you. . . . But . . . we gave you your childhoods” [p.
268]. In the context of the story as a whole, is this a valid argument?
15. Is it surprising that Miss Emily admits feeling revulsion for
the children at Hailsham? Does this indicate that she believes Kathy and
Tommy are not fully human? What is the nature of the moral quandary Miss
Emily and Madame have gotten themselves into?
16. Critic Frank Kermode has noted that “Ishiguro is
fundamentally a tragic novelist; there is always a disaster, remote but
urgent, imagined but real, at the heart of his stories” [London
Review of Books, April 21, 2005]. How would you describe the
tragedy at the heart of Never
Let Me Go?
17. Some reviewers have expressed surprise that Kathy, Tommy, and
their friends never try to escape their ultimate fate. They cling to the
possibility of deferral, but never attempt to vanish into the world of
freedom that they view from a distance. Yet they love the film The
Great Escape, “the moment the American jumps over the barbed
wire on his bike” [p. 99]. Why might Ishiguro have chosen to present
them as fully resigned to their early deaths?
18. Reread the novel’s final paragraph, in which Kathy describes
a flat, windswept field with a barbed wire fence “where all sorts of
rubbish had caught and tangled.” She imagines Tommy appearing here in
“the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed
up” [p. 287]. What does the final sentence indicate about Kathy’s state
of mind as she faces her losses and her own death—stoicism, denial,
courage, resolution?
19. In a recent interview, Ishiguro talked about Never
Let Me Go: “There are things I am more interested in
than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the
world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend
their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really
matter? Most of the things that concern them concern us all, but with
them it is concertinaed into this relatively short period of time. These
are things that really interest me and, having come to the realization
that I probably have limited opportunities to explore these things,
that’s what I want to concentrate on. I can see the appeal of travel
books and journalism and all the rest of it and I hope there will be
time to do them all one day. But I just don’t think that day is now.”
How do these remarks relate to your own ideas about the book? [Interview
with Nicholas Wroe, The
Guardian, February 2, 2005.]
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