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The Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro Essay

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Many novels tackle the question of what it means to be human. Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro takes a different approach to this question by using clones. Kathy H., the narrator of said novel, lives in a world, and more specifically a home, that tries to prove that clones are human. By comparing her to other human characters like Stevens from Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989) and by using obvious examples of her acting human, it appears that Kathy and all clones in the novels are human. If they are human, what does this mean for the novel’s ethics? By answering the question of a clone’s humanity and examining it through Ishiguro’s lenses, it becomes apparent that what is happening to Kathy is unethical but potentially unavoidable.
An easy way to find out if Kathy is human is to compare her to someone who is definitely human. One obvious character comparison can be made between Kathy and Stevens. Both narrators are astoundingly similar with their narration style. Like Stevens, Kathy constantly moves through her story in a “stream-of-conciousness” type of narration. For instance, Kathy does this when she says that “while we’re on the subject of the tokens, I want just to say a bit about our Sales…” and proceeds to forgo her train of thought about the token controversy until she explains this new information (ebook 35). Whenever either of them think of something, whether it appears as relevant to the story or not, they will stop their current thought and instead

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