Senior English | Unit 4 | Topic 1 | Creative Responses: Analysis

Read a Plot Overview of the entire book or a chapter by chapter Summary and Analysis.

"Never Let Me Go is a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It was published in 2005 but is set in the 1990s. However, Ishiguro’s version of 1990s society is not one that readers will recognise. A dystopia exists where many individuals are cloned from other people in order to be used as organ donors ... "

"In his novel Kazuo Ishiguro has chosen to examine many issues, the most important one being identity. However, throughout Never Let Me Go he also explores the themes of nostalgia and friendship ... "

"The main character in Never Let Me Go is Kathy H. The reader is never told her surname and perhaps this is an indication that the cloned students are denied a full identity and not given surnames but merely letters in order to differentiate one particular student in Hailsham from another with the same name ... "

"Never Let Me Go is a novel – this has an impact on its language and structure. It is narrated by Kathy in a non-linear way and so the reader sees events from Kathy’s point of view ... "

"The language Kazuo Ishiguro uses in his novel is realistic and reflects the time in which the novel is set (the 1990s). Kathy and her friends speak very much as you would expect young people to speak, although at the same time it is impossible to deny that there is something rather middle class about the language they use and the context of their discussions ... "

"The novel is centred on the life of the narrator Kathy and her two school friends, Tommy and Ruth. Although other people enter Kathy’s life, such as Chrissie and Rodney, Tommy and Ruth are always there ... "

" ... Unlike many other writers who distrust and avoid interviews, Ishiguro has been willing to submit to a surprisingly large number for a writer whose literary output has been restricted to six novels. Such willingness to discuss his novels may suggest that he himself senses the need to confront (mis)readings of his work ... "

"The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the narrator as storyteller is not used in the same way throughout Kazuo Ishiguro s six novels and that the literary strategy of storytelling plays a more active role in When We Were Orphans (2.000) and Never Let Me Go (2005) ... "

"Never Let Me Go draws a subtle analogy between the lives of the clones and the racially marginalized, exposing the tensions in contemporary science over the question of race ... "

"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 ... "

"Now, the story he wants to talk about is his new novel, Never Let Me Go. Scratch that: He'd actually rather talk about anything else because when he sits down to describe the plot, he says -- again with the laughter -- that it sounds "like a very unpleasant book," a book that only weirdoes would take on vacation with them ... "

"This article offers a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a meditation on human
mortality ... "

"One of the signature effects of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is a moment when a character behaves with sudden, inexplicable, and astonishing cruelty - not to a stranger, but to an intimate ... "

"In this article, I will investigate the concept of "othering" originally as part of a post-colonial theory. This concept is interested in many academic areas, including a literary study. In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go" is about human clones raised for organs. The clones are excluded and discriminated to be "the other" from the normal people. The manifestations of othering in "Never Let Me Go" can be presented in the forms of linguistic features, indoctrination, objectification, and assimilation ... "