1. Kathy introduces herself as an experienced carer. She prides
herself on knowing how to keep her donors calm, "even before fourth
donation" [p. 3]. How long does it take for the meaning of such
terms as "donation," "carer," and "completed" to be fully
revealed?
2. Kathy addresses us directly, with statements like "I don't
know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we used to have
some form of medical every week" [p. 13], and she thinks that we
too might envy her having been at Hailsham [p. 4]. What does Kathy
assume about anyone she might be addressing, and why?
3. Why is it important for Kathy to seek out donors who are
"from the past," "people from Hailsham" [p. 5]? She learns from a
donor who'd grown up at an awful place in Dorset that she and her
friends at Hailsham had been really "lucky" [p. 6]. How does the
irony of this designation grow as the novel goes on? What does
Hailsham represent for Kathy, and why does she say at the end that
Hailsham is "something no one can take away" [p. 287]?
4. Kathy tells the reader, "How you were regarded at Hailsham,
how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you
were at 'creating'" [p. 16]. What were Hailsham's administrators
trying to achieve in attaching a high value to creativity?
5. Kathy's narration is the key to the novel's disquieting
effect. First person narration establishes a kind of intimacy
between narrator and reader. What is it like having direct access
to Kathy's mind and feelings? How would the novel be different if
narrated from Tommy's point of view, or Ruth's, or Miss
Emily's?
6. What are some of Ruth's most striking character traits? How
might her social behavior, at Hailsham and later at the Cottages,
be explained? Why does she seek her "possible" so earnestly [pp.
159-67]?
7. One of the most notable aspects of life at Hailsham is the
power of the group. Students watch each other carefully and try on
different poses, attitudes, and ways of speaking. Is this behavior
typical of most adolescents, or is there something different about
the way the students at Hailsham seek to conform?
8. How do Madame and Miss Emily react to Kathy and Tommy when
they come to request a deferral? Defending her work at Hailsham,
Miss Emily says, "Look at you both now! You've had good lives,
you're educated and cultured" [p. 261]. What is revealed in this
extended conversation, and how do these revelations affect your
experience of the story?
9. Why does Tommy draw animals? Why does he continue to work on
them even after he learns that there will be no deferral?
10. Kathy reminds Madame of the scene in which Madame watched
her dancing to a song on her Judy Bridgewater tape. How is Kathy's
interpretation of this event different from Madame's? How else
might it be interpreted? Is the song's title again recalled by the
book's final pages [pp. 286-88]?
11. After their visit to Miss Emily and Madame, Kathy tells
Tommy that his fits of rage might be explained by the fact that "at
some level you always knew" [p. 275]. Does this imply that Kathy
didn't? Does it imply that Tommy is more perceptive than Kathy?
12. Does the novel examine the possibility of human cloning as a
legitimate question for medical ethics, or does it demonstrate that
the human costs of cloning are morally repellent, and therefore
impossible for science to pursue? What kind of moral and emotional
responses does the novel provoke? If you extend the scope of the
book's critique, what are its implications for our own society?
13. The novel takes place in "the late 1990s," and a postwar
science boom has resulted in human cloning and the surgical
harvesting of organs to cure cancer and other diseases. In an
interview with January Magazine Ishiguro said that he is not
interested in realism.* In spite of the novel's fictitious premise,
however, how "realistically" does Never Let Me Go
reflect the world we live in, where scientific advancement can be
seemingly irresistible?
14. The teacher Lucy Wainright wanted to make the children more
aware of the future that awaited them. Miss Emily believed that in
hiding the truth, "We were able to give you something, something
which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to
do that principally by sheltering you. . . . Sometimes that meant
we kept things from you, lied to you. . . . But . . . we gave you
your childhoods" [p. 268]. In the context of the story as a whole,
is this a valid argument?
15. Is it surprising that Miss Emily admits feeling revulsion
for the children at Hailsham? Does this indicate that she believes
Kathy and Tommy are not fully human? What is the nature of the
moral quandary Miss Emily and Madame have gotten themselves
into?
16. Critic Frank Kermode has noted that "Ishiguro is
fundamentally a tragic novelist; there is always a
disaster, remote but urgent, imagined but real, at the heart of his
stories" [London Review of Books, April 21, 2005]. How
would you describe the tragedy at the heart of Never Let Me
Go?
17. Some reviewers have expressed surprise that Kathy, Tommy,
and their friends never try to escape their ultimate fate. They
cling to the possibility of deferral, but never attempt to vanish
into the world of freedom that they view from a distance. Yet they
love the film The Great Escape, "the moment the American
jumps over the barbed wire on his bike" [p. 99]. Why might Ishiguro
have chosen to present them as fully resigned to their early
deaths?
18. Reread the novel's final paragraph, in which Kathy describes
a flat, windswept field with a barbed wire fence "where all sorts
of rubbish had caught and tangled." She imagines Tommy appearing
here in "the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood
had washed up" [p. 287]. What does the final sentence indicate
about Kathy's state of mind as she faces her losses and her own
death - stoicism, denial, courage, resolution?
19. In a recent interview, Ishiguro talked about Never
Let Me Go: "There are things I am more interested in than
the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the
world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they
transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the
things that really matter? Most of the things that concern them
concern us all, but with them it is concertinaed into this
relatively short period of time. These are things that really
interest me and, having come to the realization that I probably
have limited opportunities to explore these things, that's what I
want to concentrate on. I can see the appeal of travel books and
journalism and all the rest of it and I hope there will be time to
do them all one day. But I just don't think that day is now." How
do these remarks relate to your own ideas about the book?
[Interview with Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, February 2,
2005.]
