Never Let Me Go | Blade Runner: Dignity of the Human Person

"Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about human clones raised for organs, is most often critiqued as science fiction or dystopian literature by the scholarly community. Yet focusing on the institutional implementation of cloning obscures a more critically fertile theme: sentiment. As demonstrated in this article, the novel has deeper affinities with sentimental and abolitionist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with speculative fiction. This generic reevaluation makes way for a broader critical approach to the novel's notion of humanness in the post-genome age ... "

"The article examines Jürgen Habermas's text: The Future of Human Nature, focused on the implications of the development of biotechnological practices such as preimplantation genetic diagnostics and the possibilities of embryo modeling. Habermas' thesis that the uncontrolled use of the mentioned practices creates a danger of possible instrumentalisation of man and the creation of relations of dependence between different groups of people is analyzed. In such a perspective, the report centers around Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go as an illustration of a possible future in which technology will allow the creation of human clones used as a source of spare parts. Various examples of such instrumentalisation of the human body in the last two decades are also given - surrogate motherhood, the egg market and even the case in which parents created a child to save the life of his/ sister through a bone marrow transplant. These already available instances of instrumentalisation of the human are pointed out in order to question the anthropological consequences of the advancement of biotechnology and its almost unchallenged imposition as a form of scientific progress that will lead to the improvement of the humankind but perhaps it will rather mark its end."

"The article discusses the motif of cruelty in the works of Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. The author examines Ishiguro's insight into the bleak truths of the human psyche, focusing on the novel "Never Let Me Go," which details the life of a woman who cares for clones in a dystopian England of the 1990s."

"This article examines Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go as a type of Bildungsroman that presents coded models of contemporary human rights issues. It shows how autobiographical storytelling functions within the novel as a form of rights claim that gives voice to the suffering of an oppressed social group. The article demonstrates how the text grapples with the effects of storytelling on individual psychologies, both as a constructive response to atrocity and as a potentially dubious method of overcoming traumatic experience. It also underscores Ishiguro's sensitivity to the ways that aestheticized forms of traumatic experience are consumed by the general public with a mixture of empathy, indifference, and perversion."

"In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go," memory and human connection play pivotal
roles in shaping the characters' identities and relationships. This research paper explores the
complex dynamics of memory and human connection within the context of a dystopian
society where human clones, known as donors, are created for organ harvesting."

"This article offers a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a meditation on human mortality. Set in an alternative England in the 1990s, the tragic love story revolves around the relationship between three human clones. The novel depicts the trio’s growing awareness of their fate and the way they cope with the pressure and anxiety consequent on understanding what lies before them. The article investigates how the situation reflects human beings’ confrontation with mortality. The discussion places an emphasis on the link between mortality and memory, which is posited as a function of the mind that can help assuage the psychic trauma of mortality in the story."

"Examines the religious subtext in Ridley Scott's film `Blade Runner.' Film's emphasis on the Biblical story of the creation and fall of man; Exemplification of the film's central strategy of doubleness; Importance of the sibling rivalry recounted in the book of Genesis in the film; Parallelism between Jacob and the film character Deckard."

" ... “The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfactions of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be” ... "

"In this paper I look at the sci-fi film Blade Runner and the ways in which it tackles the question of defining the human and posthuman. The film examines the ability of technology to change our understanding of what is specifically “human” and raises some important bioethical, biopolitical, and epistemological issues pertaining to the accelerating development of technology and its imbrication in the medico-juridical system ... "

"According to Steven M. Sanders, every film genre raises philosophical questions. The romantic film may ask, what is love? The action film, what is power? The crime genre, what is Justice? But the science fiction genre raises questions, such as how the future will be. What is the purpose of existence? What does it mean to be a human? ... "