Never Let Me Go
SOME QUICK BACKGROUND
Never Let Me Go was a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro released in 2005.
PLOT
The novel takes place in the 1990s and tells the story of childhood friends Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, as remembered by Kathy as she decides to transition from the role of carer to donor. The novel is divided into three parts from here, as Kathy organizes her memories: Childhood, Adult, and Donor. The novel reveals that while the world Kathy lives in is very much like our own, it is also very different. In the 1950s cloning was perfected, and soon clones were used as a ready supply for organ donation. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were born to be organ donors.
While this is central to who they were and who they will become, Ishiguro’s novel doesn’t rely on this device, as it tells a story of friendship, memory, love, betrayal, hope, disappointment, and the softness of one world colliding with the hardness of another.
GENRE, STYLES, AND THEMES
Ishiguro uses metafiction in really interesting ways, especially with how he uses it to explore the nature of memory. Kathy’s narrative often goes off on tangents, one event making her recall another, and chronological order, while seemingly central, as the novel is divided into parts based on a sense of chronology, goes out the window. The novel reflects on the ways we remember and retell stories, which is very similar to Kathy’s style.
Frame narrative: Kathy is looking back on her life and retelling her story as a way to find closure before transitioning from carer to donor.
Historiographic metafiction: Kathy’s story is told as a sort of journal or memento of her life and times. The way Kathy’s story is told also acts as a commentary on the way people in general recall events and retell events.
Unreliable narrator: Due to the fact that we are getting all the stories from Kathy, and her emotions and perspective are clearly in play, there is inevitably some unreliability in her narrative. What we know of the other characters, specifically Ruth and Tommy, is only as much as Kathy knows them and colored by how she knows them and what she thinks of them.