Never Let Me Go: The Potential for Human
Nature in Liminal Space
It would be an injustice to not
blatantly point out the narrative technique of “Never Let Me Go.” The story is
told in the first person point of view, framed as a conversation in which the “you”
is nearly immediately lost; instead, readers are only reminded at the very end
of the story that this entire narrative stemmed from Kathy introducing herself
to someone, a “you” who isn’t actually the reader. Instead, this “you” is
someone within her world, someone wholly diegetic: “If you’re one of them, I
can understand how you might get resentful… Kathy H., they say, she gets to
pick and choose…” (4). This frame fades quickly, as Kathy recounts her
childhood from the perspective of her thirty-one-year-old self, but is recalled
at the end of the narrative when Kathy supposes that “you might think” her
relationship with Tommy would have inevitably changed, once he’d chosen to get
a new carer (283). Here, it feels that Kathy is once more in the present,
speaking to a “you” that is before her, a feeling that grows as the book
finishes. This conversation implies intimacy. If this “you” is someone who
knows Kathy, if this “you” feels like a human would as they hear the story,
then how are we as external readers to challenge the identity of the “I”?
Because of the intense sense of companionship presented in this story, is Kathy’s
identity as a character, as a human being,
not already pre-established?
This is the role of the narrator.
Perhaps it is an element of a story as a whole, something every bit as cliché and
expected as ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end.’ Kathy has an identity as a
narrator and she proves herself time and again a potentially unreliable one,
citing occasions in which she was not truly sure what Ruth or Tommy were
thinking, or saying that she does not remember the exact details of a
conversation, or allowing the addressee to know that her thoughts could have
been mainly supposition; think of when she recalls seeing Harry, a student from
Hailsham, in a care center post-donation. She supposes that “maybe later, when
he wasn’t so tired, or when the medication wasn’t so strong, he’d have tried to
place [her] and remembered” (102). What’s more is that the story was written by
a human being and that its readers are human beings; could our own perception
of what it is to be human be projected onto this narrator? If her own society
deems the clones as less-than, who are we to hold them as equal-to? Facing
these questions, it is important to turn to the moments in which Kathy does not consider herself in the grand scheme
of civil rights or in her disastrously uncertain place in the world. This is
why we now turn to the moments in which Kathy is alone, in which her ultimate identity
can be looked at through the lens of the reader’s expectations of human nature
when Kathy herself isn’t thinking about it at all.
First, we must attack the discussion
of humanity from the same stance as the characters in the novel; if clones are
truly human, then they have souls. These souls can potentially be revealed
through their artwork, but is most evident to the reader in the clones’ ability
to feel and to love. (Moreover, these are traits easily connected with human nature
and human identity.) Kathy believes herself to have a soul, and this is
something that she never questions, despite her proclivity for “always trying
to find things out” with Tommy in her youth (284). When she and Tommy meet Madame
and Miss Emily, she asks her why the guardians would ever have had to try to
prove that the students had souls in the first place, if/why someone on the
outside ever would have thought that they “didn’t have souls” (260). Kathy’s
assertion of soul (and by extension, of identity) is the only moment in which
she asserts, too, her humanity. She has a soul. She has. She is. (This falter
as she speaks to Miss Emily is exactly why first person narration is revelatory
of humanity. Frankly, this story could not have been presented in any other
way; if Ishiguro’s goal is to put Kathy’s humanity into question, he needs to give us first-person access to
Kathy.) Yet there are still questions to be answered: if Kathy thinks that she
has a soul, then why does she still not fully equate herself with the people on
the outside? She looks like a human, enough for a gallery employee to think her
an art student, enough for waitresses to serve her without disgust. So why
doesn’t she ever try to abandon her destiny? Is Kathy complicit to her identity as clone by not striving more
for an identity as human?
A carer for longer than most clones
ever are, Kathy is in a unique position for escape. She’s good at her job, good
enough for people like Miss Emily to hear word of her track record, good enough
to earn a reputation amongst donors and carers alike that she’s able to chose
who she’d like to look after. For a world that does not allow clones to have real
power, Kathy seems to wield whatever it is she’s got. Despite growing up in a
sheltered Hailsham, she knows enough of England to drive Tommy home from Littlehampton
via the quiet back roads. She hops all around North Wales and Dover and
Worcestershire et alia to care for her donors, and the clones’ lack of immediate
physical diversity could serve as grounds for an argument against Kathy’s
veritable humanity. Save for seeking a deferral with Tommy, which would only
delay her destiny by three years regardless, Kathy accepts her ultimate fate as
a donor.
Can we allot humanity to someone unable
to depart from her otherness? Here, we may expect physical exploration. Kathy and her fellow students never leave
Hailsham as students, and when they are finally sent off to the Cottages, they
are typically unwilling to leave the comfort of their regulated lives: “I don’t
think we were afraid exactly… you have to remember that until that point we’d
never been beyond the grounds of Hailsham, and we were just bewildered” (118).
This is why Kathy never trying to escape her fate is not at all surprising. She
has nowhere to escape to, and had she left Hailsham or the Cottages or her
carership, she would still be the same person. Instead, she drives around
England between her myriad donors and escapes mentally, asserting her identity by who – rather than where – she is.
Now we look to solitude as grounds
for identity, as it would be remiss to not address the liminality intrinsic to
human identity. For the better part of her eleven years as a carer, Kathy is
suspended in liminal space. Alone as she drives, she listens to her Norfolk
Judy Bridgewater tape and she reminisces, thinks, and plans. In the weeks
leading up to her Littlehampton visit, she plans what she’ll say to Madame. She
exists within herself, a disorientating state of threshold between student and
donor. We are able to piece apart Kathy’s internality thanks to the first
person narration but also thanks to her detailed descriptions of what she thinks
about milestones and how her thoughts have changed with retrospect. Perhaps the
most important moment is that which is titular, as a young Kathy sways to “Never
Let Me Go” in her empty dormitory clutching an imaginary baby, watched in quiet
heartbreak by Madame. Of course, this moment is later proved to be important to
Madame, too, as she sees it as a confrontation with the true immorality of
donor science. Kathy never implies regret surrounding either of these interactions
with Madame, other than wishing her original tape was never stolen; in fact,
immediately after the latter event, she “hardly [discusses] the meeting” with
Tommy at all, and certainly does not delve further into it with the “you”
presented in the beginning of the narrative (272).
These and other moments draw the reader
into this liminality. There is a threshold that we are never invited to cross
with Kathy, a place where she exists alone within thoughts we are not told
explicitly. This is even evident in scenes in which the reader is eventually told something that Kathy has
been suspecting, such as when she confirms that Madame is speaking to someone
behind her, asking a darkened figure if she’s “gone too far” (253). A first
person narration specified as unreliable by its own narrator, one that is not
at all immediately straightforward, one that still requires thought on the part
of the interlocutor: who, if not a human, could produce something like this? The
innate withholding of information…what could be more human?
In this attempt to prove that
humanity is evident in Kathy (or, at the very least, that human nature is not
confined to humans alone in the world of “Never Let Me Go”), we now turn to the
final moment of Kathy. The closing scene of the book features Kathy returning
to her addressee. She tells them that just a few days ago, a donor complained
that their memories of their life fade quickly. Kathy disagrees, and explains to
this addressee (as she may not have to that donor) that she does not feel this
way; rather, she refuses to forget about Ruth and Tommy and Hailsham despite
their foregone existence. In the end, she situates herself in a dreamland Norfolk,
“the spot where everything [she’d] ever lost since [her] childhood had washed
up” (287). This is a true liminal space
for her, a place where she is utterly alone not only because of the
circumstances of her dream but because it
is a dream. This is not a place anyone else can access. Regardless of the
physical closeness that Kathy experiences with her donors or the immediate
companionship of the interlocutor, this scene highlights the internal
manifestations of human nature by undergoing a kind of awakening, a reverie of solitude
manifest. Even here, in a liminal space, there is a sense that Kathy is
tangible. She’s human.
She’s who she is supposed to be.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Vintage Books, Random House, Inc., 2006.
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