Organ Donors in Kazus Ishiguro´s Never Let Me Go

Biologically, a human is a homo-sapien. However, when we begin to analyze the acts that constitute human behavior, the criteria of being human becomes difficult to characterize. The definition of humanness becomes not what holds us together, but what makes us different. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, narrates the life of Kathy H, a clone that is raised in isolation with her fellow clones at Hailsham, an academy that prepares its students to ‘complete’ their lives as organ donors. Because Kathy lives an expedited life filled with the human emotions of love, pain, and jealousy, the audience is convinced of the humanness shared by each student until Ishiguro critically reveals the process of donations. The discussion is redirected from

Instead, Ishiguro introduced the readers to the creation’s point of view. The novel portrayed them as beings with complex humanness rather than mindless monsters, preventing them from being reduced to simple antagonist. The trio - Kathy, Ruth and Tommy - are students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school for cloned children whom were born and raised solely for the purpose of organ donations. Never Let Me Go whisks the reader into an alternative world of 1990’s England and into the lives of these children, a world filled with much light yet as much darkness. What hides behind this boarding school was deceit and manipulation. While there was art and literature classes, all education was geared towards conditioning the students to fulfill their predetermined responsibility - the sole task of organ donation. The children have no concrete knowledge outside the walls of Hailsham as they were sheltered from the brutal reality of their fate. However at the same time, sheltered from the alienation and fear of their existence. To the outside world, they were nothing more than a disposable vessel carrying replacement organs. Thus, frightening to those who didn’t hold the same fate. But, also not “human enough” to deserve human rights. This results to the perplexity of the trio as they are torn between the identity they established themselves and the identity the world defines them as. Yet no one attempted to question or escape this parasitism relationship. Or is it simply because one acclimates to their environment? But perhaps no amount of pondering or pursuit of another dream could ever change the inevitable outcome. After all, it is society that ultimately decides their fate: creation of life and loss of life. Even the children maintain this

The use of diction and metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go emphasizes on the social inequalities in the dystopian society. At this point in the novel, Kathy is reflecting on her childhood at Hailsham, specifically upon the moment when she and the rest of the clones realize that they are different. The clones/children come across this epiphany when they decide to crowd around Madame to see her reaction. Better transition to this sentence? Ishiguro’s use of the phrase, “the moment when you realize that you really are different to them…who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you” (Ishiguro 36) highlights the obvious distinction between humans and clones. The expression “shudder at the thought” demonstrates the amount

In "Never Let Me Go", The novel begins by capturing the life of Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school designed to raise "special" students by dooming them to a determined fate of relinquishing their internal organs. As they grow older, the students are sent to complete their given tasks which are aided by specific "training" and eventually relocation to different hospitals in order to becoming a donor or "carer" for the donor before becoming one himself. Ishiguro focuses more on the emotional side of his characters by developing very sensitive relationships between the "clones", as they reflect upon their childhoods and set out to find answers to many secrets about the isolated gates of Hailsham. As a result, numerous themes are used freedom and free will, language and commumication, fate, power, class distinction. Also various techniques are used as narration style, symbolism,settings and the importance of the title.

In Never Let Me Go there is no brutality or “secret special police unit”, the tragedy happens quietly. The lives of clones are carefully planned; first Hailsham, Cottages, then becoming a carer and finally a donor. Sense of the powerlessness of the individuals in the face of the inevitable fate is emphasized throughout the whole novel. The reader keep waiting for even one of the donors to rebel, but it never happens - no matter how terrible things get, no one ever shows any outrage against the system. Instead, they cling to the only ray of hope they have – the deferrals (deferring for three or four years before getting killed), but it soon turns out to be non-existent. Clones simply reconcile with their fate and face death without putting much of a fight for their right to live. It is a society in which human resources (harvesting clones for their organs) are widely

Miss Lucy, a teacher, tells them if they are “to have decent lives, [they] have to know who [they] are”, but ultimately they never can. Deckard in BladeRunner similarly wonders about a Replicant ‘how can it not know what it is?’ - to a human like him it is incomprehensible to not know one’s self. The longing of Ishiguro’s Ruth to know her origins is seen clearly in her desperate attempt to find her ‘possible’, the human she was modelled after. These ‘possibles’ represent the clones’ only links to a society they will never belong to, and Ruth’s frustration at her failure to understand her past connects with the human desire to learn from the past to create identity. She loses hope for this, instead deciding that they all are ‘modelled on trash’ and that to find their possibles they should ‘look in the gutter’. Scott illustrates this concept in a slightly

Kathy is the main character that fails to be comfortable, she had to suppress her sadness and overall appear to be happy on the outside in order to keep her relationship with John sustainable. She lives every single day faking a smile and she has no one to outlet to due to the fact that they are in the middle of nowhere with “no towns or people nearby.” O’Brien uses the relationship and Kathy’s life to strengthen his theme and to communicate it to the reader in an understandable example. This suppression of emotion Kathy endures builds up and lead to a tipping point which occurs in the end of the novel when Kathy essentially disappears. The disappearance of Kathy contributes to his message because no one wants to live a life along the lines of Kathys, the reader is able to understand the horrific consequences of choosing the wrong people to surround yourself with and that is what O’Brien wants the reader to take

With the evolution of time variety of advanced and useful medical procedures to save lives have been discovered, one of which being organ donations. Now days patients suffering from serious and life threatening conditions have the option of getting their organs replaced; a second chance at life. It should be mandatory that all people, once they have died be organ and tissue donors because after death they no longer need or use their organs. Secondly, by simply donating you could save numerous lives and lastly, there are critical organ shortages within Canada which could be resolved if there were more donors available

In the book Unwind, they use 99.4 percent of everyone’s body during the operation. They do not use the things that no one will need or that the body doesn’t need to function. The organs that aren’t used, like the appendix, is thrown out because no one needs it. Organ donation will not reach the level it did in the book, but it will be able to take body parts from one person and give it to another person. This will happen because we are advancing in technology and medicine, people are trying to grow and invent organs, or other body parts, to help speed up those that are waiting, and more people are dieing from not getting organs fast enough.

Ishiguro’s critique of empathetic engagement in relation to a humanising education modulates into questioning the concept of empathy itself. In Never Let Me Go, the aporia presented in the clones’ understanding of their role in the world in comparison to the authorities ultimately frustrates opportunities for empathy. Madame’s witnessing of the young Kathy dancing with a pillow to the Judy Bridgewater song, Never Let Me Go, has been interpreted by Marvin Mirsky as providing a ‘replica’ of a baby, which is both a compensation for her own motherless state and her future infertility (2006, pp. 628-30). Madame’s empathy for Kathy is seen in Kathy’s realisation that Madame is watching the scene “...and the odd thing was she was crying. It might have even been one of her sobs that had come through the

Never Let Me Go is an incredibly intense novel, filled with many emotional scenes. Ultimately, it includes the perfect examples of a full-blown identity crisis. The children raised at Hailsham are desperate to understand the purpose of their own lives, bodies, and minds. The children attain a sense of identity through their treasured collections, creativity, artwork and delicate social structures.

In the film "Never Let Me Go" shows a group of kids or students who goes to a boarding school called Hailsham and they are constructed to make artwork for a gallery to see who has the best artwork. However, these kids are later informed that their true purpose is to donate their organs and they will later die or be "complete" because they are clones. In other words, they are not real people, only design to serve a purpose in donating their organs. Three students, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are introduced, Kathy has a crush on Tommy but Ruth starts to go after Tommy herself. Years later they leave the Hailsham and are group with other clones.

Kathy is the narrator in the novel, so we see things in her viewpoint. She is a thirty-one year-old woman, and has been a carer for eleven years as she is good at it; she was Ruth and Tommy's carer for some time. She is a human clone just like Ruth and Tommy. All three of them were Hailsham students and were close friends. Kathy is reserved, quiet, empathetic, mild-mannered, and passive most of the time, especially with Ruth.

Svenaeus, Fredrik. "The body as a gift, resource or commodity? Heidegger and the ethics of organ transplantation." Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (2010): 163-172.

Most people dream to have a great future, fall in love, get married, have a family, but most importantly have a wonderful life. What if your life had been planned out for you and the sole purpose of your existence was to donate your vital organs? Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go is a tragic love story between two human clones that fall in love before they know what love truly is. The clones are raised until adulthood in Hailsham, a boarding school for clones, to later become organ donors. They are trained to become nurses or “carers” to take care of “donors” as they recover after organs have been removed. The clones are involuntary forced to donate all their vital organs until death or until they “complete.” Kathy H. and Tommy are two clones whose love journey began when they were children within the walls of Hailsham. The two friends became close and confided in each other about everything. In time their friendship became into something more; however, Kathy and Tommy would find themselves in a love triangle. Before they moved to the cottages, where they learned to live among normal humans, Ruth, who was Kathy and Tommy’s friend, dated Tommy, but Tommy and Kathy loved each other. Their love would face many obstacles, but their love always found its way back to each other. In the end, with hope to buy their love some time, they find Madame to obtain a deferral but are faced with the devastating truth and would be forced to face their fate.