The strange familiarity to Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go, which Mark Rollins describes as “alternate realism,” is generative for considering how the exploitation and struggle it presents represents something of our own reality. Scholars have previously interpreted this text to be, for example, a critique on forced participation in market economics, a critique of capitalism and working conditions for the poor, or a reflection on colonial subjectivity. Each of these interpretations offers us a critical look in the mirror, asking us to rethink individuality in order to see collectivity clearer. Still, it seems that there is room to go deeper. Why is it that, even if we do recognize that we are living in an unjust world, it is still so difficult to imagine the experience of another? How is it that our ethics and our politics do not see eye to eye? 

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Judith Butler’s meditation on grief and grieving in her book chapter “Violence, Mourning, Politics” offers some direction here. Part of Butler’s 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, this essay poses three key questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?...What makes for a grievable life?” (20). This emphasis on grief and humanness is a productive foundation upon which other considerations of the novel, such as the political or economic arguments, may be more clearly realized. 

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As Butler insinuates in the questions above, it is not just grief we should consider, but rather the relationality between individuals that makes grief unquestionable in some cases but only possible, or conditional, in other cases. Butler’s exigence for this piece was the US’s response to 9/11. She critiques the US’s military response as impulsive and jingoistic, as an indication that we were not willing to grieve the lives lost and instead sought retaliation. This human tendency for brash, quick answers to convoluted issues produces a condition in which we stoke flames without ever eliminating them. As such, we are still amid the decades-long “War on Terror” that ensued after the Bush administration first invaded the Middle East. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs recently estimated that as many as 929,000 people have been killed as a direct consequence of the US’s wars in primarily Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen (Watson Institute). What is more, they suggest that “several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease” (Watson Institute). The number is so unfathomable, the names and faces so obscured, that for sympathetic readers who do not have a direct connection to this violence, grief itself may still be a distant process, and their experience instead may be one of sadness, anger, or disgust at their government’s ethics. 

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This phenomenon is certainly not confined to military conflict alone. Just this week, the New York Times published an online memorial for the more than one million people that have died in the US since the COVID-19 outbreak began here in February of 2020. Despite the ever-climbing infection rates and deaths, arguments have persisted against vaccinations, against mask mandates, and against common-sense business precautions. This public health dilemma differs from the War on Terror because the devastation we are incurring happens on our own soil, right before our eyes. Yet, for some of us, there remains a distance between the self and others’ loss, evidenced by the prevalence of such arguments. 

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Butler writes, “The obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life” (Butler 34). In other words, it is the tool that brings a death into the social, public sphere. If we assume Butler’s vision of grief – that is, as a binding human condition that operates on personal and social strata – then developing the ability to grieve for those whose lives we are not already conditioned to grieve is critical. For two distant parties, the relationship between the life to be grieved and the griever can be fastened by this process of public obituary. We are yet to know whether mass obituaries like the one the New York Times recently published will have this effect. A precondition to exposure to obituaries like this is, unfortunately, that the sources one turns to for news deems this a worthy story. In today’s intensely partisan media climate, that may often not be the case. That said, without public obituaries, we remain in a state of mutual unrecognition, whereby a death “abroad” – that is, beyond our circle of socially-conditioned relatability – strikes us merely as the loss of a dehumanized life.

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has much to say about grief and much to add to Butler’s notion of human connection through mutual recognition and grievability. In a way, the story feels like an obituary of sorts. Kathy’s narration begins in present-day and moves through a series of semi-chronological recollections that lead up to the present; in that way, the story is entirely analepsis. We know the general trajectory of clone life, we know that Kathy is transitioning from carer to donor in eight months, and we know the troubling journey that donors endure. We also know that Kathy is narrating after the death of her closest friends; before she enters the first flashback, she states, “these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember” (Ishiguro 4). It is not a stretch, therefore, to think of this novel as an obituary. Thinking along these lines, I argue that the novel’s main, and perhaps sole, triumph is that Kathy has developed the ability to grieve broadly. This achievement is what enables her to craft a dynamic obituary, one that remembers Tommy and Ruth’s lives, that preemptively remembers her own life, and that memorializes the struggles of the clone population, at large. 

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Ishiguro introduces the grief in this story right from the cover. The title is an imperative, or perhaps a plea, for connection, or security, or some sense of permanence. Shameem Black has argued that the phrase “never let me go” is “the only sentence in the novel that explicitly rages against the condition of the students” (803). This may be true. The ending of the novel, however, problematizes the idea of a need for rebellion. We find an apt response in Butler’s reading of Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes”: “the comparative framework in which First World feminists develop their critique of the conditions of oppression for Third World women on the basis of universal claims not only misreads the agency of Third World feminists, but also falsely produces a homogenous conception of who they are and what they want” (47). Butler continues, “We do not need to ground ourselves in…a single model of reason, a single notion of the subject before we are able to act” (48). While the reader may itch for Ishiguro to give some rebellion to the students, that desire unproductively – and perhaps harmfully – casts our own model of reason upon the characters in the story. Kathy does not rebel in the sense that she evades the oppressive, predetermined life mold set for her. Her “act” is to grieve deeply and to push the audience to grieve, too. The phrase “never let me go” contains an implied but unspecified “you.” It could speak to, for example, Tommy, Ruth, Hailsham, humanity, those who oversee the transition from carer to donor, or directly to the reader. Or, it could speak to all of these audiences simultaneously. 

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While there are specific moments in the novel where grief takes center stage, the word itself is never mentioned. These instances of grief emerge through a multivalent landscape of loss, and we should begin to explore it by sharpening our focus on Norfolk. The students are first introduced to Norfolk in a Geography class at Hailsham. As Kathy recalls, Miss Emily described like so:  

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“You see, because it’s stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way

to anywhere. People going north and south”—she moved the pointer up and down—“they bypass it

altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a

lost corner” (Ishiguro 65). 

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Norfolk is out of the way, easy to bypass, and not frequented by the common traveler. As we learn a moment later, it becomes mythologized by the students as a place of discovery, where lost things turn up again: 

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“A lost corner. That’s what she called it, and that was what started it. Because at Hailsham, we had our

own “Lost Corner” up on the third floor, where the lost property was kept; if you lost or found anything,

that’s where you went. Someone—I can’t remember who it was—claimed after the lesson that what Miss

Emily had said was that Norfolk was England’s “lost corner,” where all the lost property found in the

country ended up. Somehow this idea caught on and soon had become accepted fact virtually throughout

our entire year” (Ishiguro 65-66). 

 

Norfolk becomes personal for the students: in their eyes, it has a mystical ability to repair loss. It is therefore a space for a space of possibility. Ishiguro literalizes this expression (i.e., space of possibility) with the “possibles” theory, the belief that the human that each student was modeled from is out there in the world, and if a student were able to track down their model, they could gain insight into their future. For the students, the lack of a familial past generates uncertainty about the future. Because they are created, not born, and because they cannot reproduce, their biological lineage ends when they “complete.” These conditions are clear to the students before they leave Hailsham but as we are told, their sense of reality is built upon half-truths – they are always “told and not told” (Ishiguro 88). Because of this, the students are accustomed to fictionalizing conclusions to the small tidbits they do know to be true. That is why the possibles theory gains traction. And of course, it is in Norfolk where the search for a possible commences.  

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After the search for Ruth’s “possible” comes to a disappointing end, Kathy and Tommy decide to take advantage of their time in Norfolk to look for Kathy’s lost cassette tape. When they find it in an old collectibles shop, Kathy recalls a mixture of emotions ranging from excitement, delightedness, mistakenness, surprise, vague embarrassment, skepticism, pleasure, and some unnamed, complicated emotion (Ishiguro 172). This dizzying array of emotion nods to the precarity of the search and the destabilizing effect it has on Kathy. The fact that these emotions arrive on the heels of Ruth’s failed search, to which Kathy’s search seems twinned, suggests that Kathy’s experience of Ruth’s “loss” (of the possibility of finding her possible) is partially responsible for the emotions. This recalls what Butler writes about the degrees of separation in loss: “when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss” (21-22). The de-stability that Kathy describes is certainly enigmatic, especially given that we assume that finding the tape will be a wholly thrilling affair. 

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On the following page, Ishiguro gives us a more certain cue. Just after finding the case for cassette tape, Kathy narrates, “We were right at the back of the shop, on a raised platform where it was darker and more secluded, like the old guy didn’t want to think about the stuff in our area and had mentally curtained it off” (Ishiguro 173). Kathy muses about the old guy’s (the shop worker’s) perspective, and the emotion she pinpoints through reference to suppressing thoughts to the dark, secluded parts of the mind is unresolved grief. There is an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, among the humans in this novel to deal directly with the exploitative relationship that they have with clones. They do not recognize clones as human, but as something other and subhuman. Miss Emily recalls that for a long time, humanity’s modus operandi was to keep clones in the shadows, to not think about them; and if they did happen to think about them, to convince themselves that clones were fundamentally less than human (Ishiguro 264-265). That dark, curtained-off area of the shop is a space of possibility, circuity, and healing for Kathy, but it is a space of denial for the human character. As long as humanity remains unwilling to change its relationship to the clones, that potential goes unrealized.

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This dynamic disturbs Butler’s “I” and “you” reading because Kathy and the old guy are not mutually-constituting characters. A loss for one is not a loss for the other; Kathy loses a cherished possession, and the old guy is imagined to end up with it, store it, and intentionally forget about it. This transfer of belonging is not unlike the corporeal exploitation at the heart of the novel: one person’s loss becomes another person’s gain. In this way, the tape comes to serve as a sort of metonym for Kathy’s life. 

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There is a moment in the novel, however, where Kathy and the tape do seem to elicit something like grief from a human character. In Part One, Kathy recounts an instance when she was dancing alone in the dorm to her tape. She narrates:

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Anyway, what I was doing was swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my

breast. In fact, to make it all the more embarrassing, it was one of those times I’d grabbed a pillow to stand

in for the baby, and I was doing this slow dance, my eyes closed, singing along softly each time those lines

came around again: “Oh baby, baby, never let me go . . .” (Ishiguro 71).

 

A moment later, Kathy notices Madame’s sorrowful gaze coming from the hallway. Kathy recognizes “something extra” in Madame’s look, and Tommy hypothesizes that it had to do with the tragic irony of the situation (Ishiguro 72-73). Like all other clones, Kathy is infertile, but because she was still unaware of this condition at the time of the incident. Tommy suggests then that Madame saw unfulfillable desire in Kathy’s enactment of motherhood, and the episode moved her to tears. When Kathy and Tommy visit Madame later in the novel, Kathy asks Madame about this reaction, expecting her to confirm their suspicions. Madame, however, denies it and reveals that she was instead moved by what she saw as a young clone holding on to the “old kind world” that new advancements in donation science would soon turn into a “harsh, cruel world” (Ishiguro 272). These misunderstandings – Kathy and Tommy’s of Madame’s reaction, and Madame’s of Kathy’s intentions – yet again reveals how disconnected humans and clones are in the novel. That Madame refers to the world that the clones inhabit as “kind” further drives this separation. Even those humans who have the closest relationship to the students, who are expected to provide for and protect them, do not understand their experiences or desires. Madame’s sorrow can thus be read as a sort of misdirected grief addressed at the exacerbating nature of exploitation rather than at the condition of exploitation itself. Once again, humanity proves that it is unwilling to grieve for the clones’ actual loss.

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By the novel’s end, the tone of Kathy’s narration turns to one of solemn acceptance. The search for possibles and brief deferrals has moved aside and in exchange, Kathy sits with the weight of being undone by Tommy’s death, of losing something in herself with his loss. The grief that Ishiguro builds into this closing passage is not of the debilitating, unresolved type though. Instead, he offers a grief coupled with acceptance. Kathy narrates:

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I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into

the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees

above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower

line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled (Ishiguro 287). 

 

Beyond the fence is a space of possibility, a plot of earth plowed and ready for new seeds. And this is where Kathy envisions Tommy. The imagery of the fence that sits catching trash recalls Ruth’s earlier outcry, when she realizes that the person they followed likely is not her possible: “We all know it. We’re modelled from trash” (Ishiguro 166). We could read this closing scene as a continuation of the metaphor of students being “trash,” disposable and forgotten just like the odd bits stuck in the fence. But Kathy does not see Tommy as another item (or being) trapped in this web, and therefore, the imagery does not contain the same indignity that is present in Ruth’s comment. In effect, Kathy’s hallucination intervenes with Ruth’s pessimism. It demonstrates that being partly constituted by another person is something altogether different from heredity, and this is something that Ruth fails to see. The students’ relationships with one another partially constitute their identities, and Tommy's death changes Kathy. In order to arrive at a place of acceptance within grief, she has to “let him go,” to shift her relationship to him beyond the confines of the fence (i.e., materiality).   

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In “Autonomy and Why You Can ‘Never Let Me Go,’” Lynne Bowyer offers a similar reading of the novel’s ending. She writes: “Our world fragments when we lose something of importance…At the end of her story, Kathy confronts everything she has lost…Such a confrontation that acknowledges a loss as a loss is necessary for healing. It is a transformative process that holds on to and affirms that which is lost has gone, whilst recognising that we carry forward its traces…” (Bowyer 146). Kathy’s world is indeed fragmented by the novel’s end, and her recognition of her loss within Tommy’s loss is what enables this transformative process, which we may call grief.

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Shameem Black goes further, suggesting that “the novel thus calls for…an empathetic inhuman aesthetics that embraces the mechanical, commodified, and replicated elements of personhood…[an] aesthetics of replication [that] allows us to sympathize with others without recourse to such constraining ideals…[that] reinvents empathy for a posthumanist age” (786). Black’s assertion is strong: Never Let Me Go does seem to reinvent empathy by challenging anthropocentrism and asking the reader to empathize with a non-human protagonist. But it is the students’ similarities to humanity (and not their differences) that facilitate this reinvention of empathy.

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Ishiguro asks us to empathize for an unfamiliar, non-human character, and he is successful. Part of the reason is because Kathy’s narration implicates the reader: we are the humanity in this text. The epigraph reads “England, late 1990s” and the novel was published in 2005, so Ishiguro chose to represent an imminent or existing dystopian present in lieu of a future dystopian society. The story is current, and thus we, humanity, would be the perpetrators of violence. This combination of empathy and guilt actually works to align the reader more closely with the clone’s experience, and thus to experience a loss themself. And to connect this back to Butler, I argue that this happens because Ishiguro’s decision to assign Kathy the role of narrator functions as a public obituary for the students’ lives. Their lives and deaths are projected into the reader’s firmament – which is to say the firmament of the human – and the students become recognizable, and therefore, grievable. The boundary between “you” and “I,” and the social and biological space between humanity and clones, begins to dissolve. What emerges in its place is a relationship between narrator and reader that replicates the students’ own condition of mutual-constitution. Kathy and the students grieve because of humans like us, and we grieve because of humanity’s blithe exploitation of the students. Like a Venn diagram or an estuary, the middle area of overlapping bodies contains the murky, enriched, collective “we” that enables us to consider a new type of relationship between “I” and “you.”

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In Giles Harvey’s recent feature of Ishiguro for the New York Times Magazine, he includes the following passage:

“I feel it’s an optimistic vision of human nature,’ Ishiguro said of “Never Let Me Go” during a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s “Bookclub” program. Love and friendship may not survive death, but they grow stronger and deeper right up until the end. As he saw it, this tenderness, and not the exploitation that the clones endure, is the moral center of the novel.

 

Ishiguro sees the novel as an optimistic possibility for humanity. The novel’s “moral center” is our beautiful effort to build relationships with others despite an awareness of our own mortality. It is a rejection of pessimistic nihilism and an embrace of possibility within our relationships. Ishiguro, it seems, sees potential in Butler’s case for grief. Michiko Kakutani’s review of the novel is a strong appraisal, but it takes a different tenor toward the novel’s ending. She writes that the novel’s one caveat is that it is “marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's ‘Psycho’” (Kakutani). Is this true? Psycho concludes with a psychoanalytic explanation that spoon-feeds the viewer Norman Bateman’s motives. The reading that I have provided, I hope, advocates for a more sympathetic attitude toward Ishiguro’s ending. The revelations that come later in the novel do not necessarily supply answers. Rather, they generate even more questions, like about the guardians’ role and complicity in the donation system, for example. Kathy may learn to grieve by the end, and she in turn may bring the reader to grieve for unfamiliar bodies, and that may be the novel’s triumph, but it is by no means the neat process that Kakutani suggests. We would do well to recall Butler’s question about the undetermined grievability of certain lives. While Kathy may have gained heightened emotional intelligence and control by the novel’s end, and that can serve her well as she deals with past and future loss and her own pending transition from carer to donor, there is no indication that the human world around her now finds her life grievable. In fact, since Kathy’s time at Hailsham, it and other schools that attempted to give students a more dignified life have shuttered their doors. The social conditions that underlie Kathy’s subjugation remain unresolved, are exacerbated even, and sit poised to ensnare students of the future. Kathy is fated to the same literally and figuratively exhaustive end of life that Tommy, Ruth, and all of the friends she has ever known and loved have endured. But through her narration, we come to “know” those lives lost, and as such, we can grieve these losses. The public obituary may not be able to undo damages already done, but it can help us to reimagine our connections to one another moving forward.

 

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References

Black, Shameem. “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, 2009,

  pp. 785–807.

Bowyer, Lynne. “Autonomy and Why You Can “Never Let Me Go.” Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 11,

  2014, pp. 139-149.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

“Costs of War – Figures” Brown University Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs,

Sept. 2021, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll. Accessed 21 May 2022.

Harvey, Giles. “Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us.” New York Times

  Magazine, 23 Feb. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/magazine/kazuo-ishiguro-klara.html. Accessed 19 May  2022.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York City, Vintage, 2005.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Sealed in a World That’s Not as It Seems.” New York Times, 4 Apr. 2005,

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/books/sealed-in-a-world-thats-not-as-it-seems.html. Accessed 18 May 2022. 

Lee, Ji Eun. "Norfolk and the Sense of Loss: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Subjectivity in

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 61,

no. 3, Fall 2019, pp. 270-290.

Rollins, Mark. “Caring Is a Gift: Gift Exchange and Commodification in Ishiguro’s Never Let

  Me Go.” CEA Critic, vol. 77, no. 3, November 2015, pp. 350-356.