Ew Art

Of all the subjects, math science, history, art, which do you most admire? I'm going to be blunt about myself here, I'd say science, and venture as far as "art isn't even core subject". I could clump myself along with that group of people who raise there eyebrows and smirk, thinking too highly of themselves when they hear "art major". I am (or should I say was) a STEM snob, through and through, and Ishiguro will simply not allow that simple-minded kind of thinking in his books.

While reading my book, Never Let Me Go if anyone needs reminding, art is emphasized.  "How you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at 'creating'''(15). The students at Hailsham study art, collect it and try to make creations good enough to get into 'the gallery'. It was believed among students that if your art was good enough, if you showed you had something undeniably human, a soul, then you would be saved, not destined to die in your 30's, but allowed to live a good and full life.

So I thought, why art, why not something more easily judged, and less subjective? For example, over break I visited a few museums, I saw a piece called "Kiss on a Rope". When my dad noticed the painting he promptly mimed gagging and walked quickly away I, however, found the piece interesting and liked its ideas about love (for anybody interested here it is,

gag-worthy or interesting?)

My point is, art is subjective, why not judge the clones based on say math ability? It'd be very easy to determine whether they are right or wrong, and the society could let the 'geniuses' live. Perhaps, if you're a cynic, you'd think the society choose to judge art because it is subjective, therefore they could justify harvesting the organs of anybody they wanted based on 'well Picasso was better'.

Or, you could take a different perspective and say Ishiguro was making a point about the complexity of human life and the importance of art.

Trying to prove that you have a soul is a tough thing to do, especially as a clone. The idea of a soul is religious in origin and is widely accepted now, but we from the science world cannot prove that even we humans have a soul, or that it really exists (in other words there is no place in the brain that we know of where consciousness resides). My interpretation of Ishiguro's decision to use art as a motif tied to worthiness comes from this, that we are more than just bundles of nerves, instinct, and hormones, we have developed beyond that. There are simply some things that science can't explain, like a soul, or consciousness. Ishiguro shows us that our worth as humans isn't dependent on, in Kath's case a natural birth, a person's usefulness to society, or any ability at all, we're all humans and worthy of life regardless of our talents and situations.

In today's world, we recognize the importance of the STEM fields. Despite what some today may think, the STEM fields are fact, not reliant on what you believe in, they simply are. Which is why the world needs art, something more human, and more complex. In the novel, Ishiguro shows us how great, or evil, science could be, and that it is the job of the arts to determine not what can be accomplished but what should be. Looking at a piece of art or reading a poem or book speaks to humans in a way that facts cannot.

All of us humans can get something different out of reading Never Let Me Go because we are all different. After letting the book sit in the back of my mind for a week what sticks with me is the commentary on science contrasted with art. However, my fellow readers could be left remembering the tragic love of Kath and Tommy, the political remarks made by way of the guardians and society as a whole (communism anybody?), the value of life and freedom, or simply the theme of death. With Never Let Me Go it really could be anything, there's something for everybody in it.

At the start of my blog, I mentioned my reason for reading Never Let Me Go was to understand the "hype" around Ishiguro, and I believe it is this: he writes for everyone, and somehow manages to write about nearly everything.

So Much Stuff That Has Meaning

Never Let Me Go, what a wild ride. Following the lives of Kath, the wonderful Tommy, and the rest of their friends, I learned all about the cloning, the organ donation, and their (not so) normal lives. The book isn't political, Kath and Tommy are straight up adorable, Ruth is enraging, but relatable, and later in her life redeemable. You just have to empathize with them, just as you would with any character in any more normal novel.

This relationship between myself and the characters, this normalcy of their lives and personalities, makes the ending section of the novel all the more important. This is when it is revealed to me how society truly views the children whose lives I followed. Up until this point I hadn't questioned the society, the normal people, they didn't play a big role, sure the people visiting their school didn't interact with them, but who isn't at least a little afraid of congregations of high school students. And yes, farming people for their organs is bad, but because the government and the rest of society weren't portrayed in the novel, I didn't think about it, I wasn't thinking politically, I merely read and enjoyed the book.

So when Miss Emily says, "We created Hailsham to prove you had souls"(237), I was right with Kath when she was saying, wait wait wait "Did someone think we didn't have souls?"(238). And this is where our book, finally, gets a bit political. Miss Emily talks to them, explain the elements of society they were never taught about. Within this speech, Ishiguro is able to make comments, and ask questions about not just the society in Never Let Me Go but any society. So let's unpack these little tidbits.

First Miss Emily gives them a speech, the gist of which is, 'no you cannot defer your donation for a few more years of life together, but you must think about how lucky you are',"You must realize how much worse things once were"(238), aka you're lives are so much better than those of the people before, and the lives of everyone who wasn't raised in a place as nice as you, so don't complain. Hasn't this been what we tell people, in our society, to silence them, sure you have it bad, but other people have it worse, so it isn't your place to complain. In the case of Kath and Tommy, they will die, apart, watching as if 'in a horror film' as their organs are removed from their barely alive bodies, because no one fights for them.

Which leads to the next little comment Ishiguro makes. Miss Emily ends her speech by explaining to the students how they had failed to prove that the students, like Tommy and Kath, had souls, that they weren't normal humans like everyone else. The reader, of course, knows better, the characters in the novel are just like me, and you, and everyone else, but Miss Emily says, "So long as the climate was in our favour, so long as a corporation or a politician could see a benefit in supporting us, then we were able to keep afloat. But that changed. The world didn't want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked"(242). Really, it wasn't about the 'experiment' it wasn't whether or not the clones deserved better, it was about whether or not people could accept them, if people wanted to acknowledge that they were farming perfectly healthy and normal (besides being sterile) people for their organs, and of course the answer is no. People want to be as left in the dark as possible, and Miss Emily explains this is because there is no going back.

"How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that future, to go back to the dark days?"(240). How can we go back? This goes beyond talking about politics and standing up for what is right. It acknowledges a moral question, talking about how far we can go as a society, but should we. Everyone has a family member who's gotten sick, now almost everyone is fixable. What sacrifices would you be willing to make to give your sibling or parent a vital organ they were in desperate need for? Probably, you'd do anything you could. However, now considering Kath, Tommy, Ruth, should we be given that choice, to essentially kill those you don't know, for those you do. Again, farming people for their organs is wrong, plain wrong, but can't we all see the conundrum in a society grown to rely on these things? Take it a step further, a step closer to home, nuclear weapons. We as a society 'need' those now too, but on a moral level, it's wrong, what if society had simply not developed them. That would be nice. In some cases, it's fair to say society has gone too far.

O.K. Congratulations to anyone who has read this far into my messy, meaning-of-the-work-as-a-whole blog post, but I could write a thesis paper that still wouldn't cover it.

To sum up, Ishiguro talks about, love, death, the moral bounds of science, politics, and friendship all through following the lives of kids a lot like me or you (minus the organ donation and secret lives in a terrible but oddly familiar society).  Never Let Me Go is genius, complicated, vague, but easily accessible, understandable, and likeable. The themes and ideas Ishiguro presents in the book are multidimensional, important, problems which he masterfully presents through storytelling.

I will leave you all with this, "I keep thinking about this river somewhere with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end, it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how I think it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together" (258).

Perhaps *This* is AP Merit?

Is Never Let Me Go AP Worthy? I've considered this questions at all the different stopping points in the novel, and after just the first few pages, I was ready to say no. Now I've changed my mind... I think?

I won't lie to you all, if I were teaching an AP English course Never Let Me Go wouldn't be in the curriculum. With so many books to choose from, I'd have a hard time justifying reading this particular novel. The main reason for this is because I don't see the significance of the meaning of the work as a whole. The books I've read for AP English so far (Poisonwood Bible, Song of Solomon, Brave New World, Handmaids Tale) all had interesting and challenging ideas about society, gender, race, and other equally tough topics, and they leave a lot to be questioned. Never Let Me Go isn't like that.

However, this is part of its charm. Nothing, and I mean nothing, in Never Let Me Go is spelled out for the reader. All the key plot points, the setting, even the main characters, are left to the readers to figure out for ourselves. The messages behind the other novels were fairly out there and in your face, you always knew what the author was trying to say. Becuase we see the world through the eyes of Kath, who see's everything from a very different perspective than we might, the ideas in the novel are very very subtle. Which creates an interesting writing style.

Never Let Me Go offers a stark contrast in writing style to the other books I read. There isn't the same conflict and drama, but that isn't to say there isn't a possibility for it. After all, all of our main characters are being farmed for their organs. However, this isn't the main focus of the book, we just follow Kath in her mundane world, she isn't much troubled by the fact that her friends are slowly dying around her, she cares about her friends lives, her job, and the gossip of the town, much like a normal person might.

On top of the offering of a different type of novel and writing style, another reason to teach Never Let Me Go is that is offers an abundance of literary techniques. Approximately every sentence has foreshadowing in it, and studying the type of narration is interesting and different as well. Something I noticed, in particular, is that the setting is very important, it holds a significance beyond what it might in your average novel, the way Kath describes the buildings often leads to insights that you might miss otherwise. For example for all of the praise Kath gives Hailsham she also talks nearly endlessly about 'the best places to talk' where others might 'not hear you or be secretly listening'. Because of this, you are shown that something secretive could be going on at Hailsham.

I suppose I will leave my readers with this, I'm not sure if Never Let Me Go is AP worthy, but I don't think that it isn't. There is enough in it to teach about, but it is yet to be determined if the 'meaning of the work as a whole' will render the novel important enough to be taught. Perhaps the other students reading my book have different opinions, this is just mine. I will have to read their blogs and find out for myself!

A Theory About Style

Perhaps the element of the novel I'm most impressed with is the style of writing. I've only just recently noticed this and formed my theory, but details concerning the dystopian society have been slipped into my mind, like reverse pickpocketing. I realized this only after Kath began discussing how she believed that the guardians slipped knowledge into the student's minds before they knew enough to understand it. It's all explained on page 74, "We'd been, 'told and not told'... throughout all our years at Hailsham, (they've) timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course, we'd taken it in at some level".

If I had been in a cartoon a light bulb would have lit up above my head. Kazuo Ishiguro has been slipping details into my mind, just like he makes the guardians do in his novel. My mind has been hacked.

What I mean is, it has recently been revealed that the students at Hailsham are not normal kids, they are being raised specifically to be organ donors, once they are old enough their 'donations' begin, and these donations continue until so many of their organs have been harvested that they die. "None of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets. Your lives are set out for you, You'll become adults, then before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs"(74). Horrifying, right? Well, I wasn't particularly perturbed when I read this. 'Yeah, that makes sense' was the first thought I had when I read this.

The reason behind this lack of surprise is I was introduced to the idea of 'donors' and 'carers' from the first page of the book when I had no idea what those words meant. The words are mentioned early on and the reader skims over them asuming they will make more sense later. Then more little details are slipped in as Kath talks about Ruth recovering from her donations, and when Kath loses her first patient, it's phrased as 'my own doner completed the night before, nobody blamed me, it was a complicated surgery'. Completed, not even died, just completed.

Beyond the sneaky familiarization of the words, those of us reading Never Let Me Go knew the kids weren't normal because regular people were afraid of them, and their bodies were more important than other peoples. Kath states as early as page 12, "At Hailsham, we had to have some form of medical almost every week", I don't know about you guys but I certainly don't think regular people go to the doctor every week. Miss Lucy also tells students it is very important they never smoke. It is so much more important for them to be healthy than for her. I guess if Miss Lucy is to get lung cancer she can just have the lungs of one of her students, no problem there.

Perhaps I am reading too far into the book... or perhaps Kazuo Ishiguro is a genius and has indeed hacked my mind. I'm curious what the other people reading Never Let Me Go have to say.

The style that Ishiguro writes in is just so captivating. While I'll be the first to admit that the beginning of the book was a little slow, now I'm very caught up in the intricacies of his writing, and the near infinite amount of foreshadowing I must pay attention to. The book is told in flashbacks, the fact that Kath is looking backward makes everything that she says more significant as we know she is building her story in an order that makes sense, including details only where we will need them later. Time and memory seem to be important themes as Kath stresses the importance of her memory, and the progression of her life. Also, as one of my blog followers, Catherine O., pointed out Never Let Me Go seems to have a lot of similarities to The Handmaid's Tale and Brave New World. Both books include themes where the type of society depicted in the novel makes you question the ethics of humans.

Another stylistic element that's worth mentioning is the way that Kath addresses the reader, as 'you'. For example, she says, "I don't know how it was where you were" and "It doesn't really matter how well your guardians tried to prepare you" implying that the reader is like Kath, raised in an estate like Hailsham, with guardians. For me, this adds to the subtle creepy vibe of the book. I really wanted to tell Kath 'What?! I don't have guardians. This isn't normal!' Obviously I couldn't, but the more I read the more I realize that Hailsham is not like other places, it seems to be more important. This is another idea that was introduced by Kath on the very first page of the novel, but I tossed it aside as unimportance until the idea recently and mysteriously resurfaced in the second part of the book. Classic Ishiguro am I right.

My next theory will have to be about how the smartest organ clones are placed in Hailsham to see if they are worth keeping in society. Regardless, between the element of mystery foreshadowing and the odd selection for point of view Ishiguro's style is very clear, and in my opinion, an effective way to shape the, shall I say, less than normal world Kath lives in.

I feel like Sherlock Holmes, but apparently he has been banned for smoking?

The reason I feel like Sherlock Holmes is because the novel, Never Let Me Go, reads like a mystery might. As I read I follow Kath's flashbacks, trying to pay attention to each detail so that I might discover the answers to the mystery before the author, Kazuo Ishiguro, expects me to. While I read the first seven chapters of the novel, I paid close attention to character.

The novel is narrated in first person and so far consists mostly of flashbacks. As I read I see the world through the eyes of Kath, the main character. There are two main ways that she characterizes the people around her, the personalities of her friends are revealed slowly as she describes her childhood. The actions and dialog that Kath describes reveal her friends' personalities. For example, she describes the temper of one of her best friends, Tommy, "Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off. Tommy took a few strides after them-it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind"(8). The descriptive language allows me to clearly imagine the scene, and empathize with Tommy. The fact that Kath is not, in fact, omniscient lets me pay attention to later details and determine for myself that Tommy probably wasn't intending to chase the boys and that he was afraid of being left alone. Tommy is a sweet boy, who isn't always socially sure of himself.

Tommy's character also shows how observant and caring Kath is as a character. She watches him and understands his struggles with fitting in and being creative.  She doesn't tease him like the other children do and feels bad for him because she understands how he feels. Kath even comforts him during his tantrum, starting to "drift over towards him, even when (she) heard Ruth's urgent whisper to (her) to come back"(9). This shows the reader how observant and kind Kath is, she seems to be more mature than her classmates, although perhaps this is simply because the novel is told from her point of view.

Details about Ruth, another of Kath's best friends, are revealed in a similar manner. Because of Kath's questionable memory, its mentioned at least every other page how hazy her memories are, while I'm reading I feel like I have to watch closely for each and every detail Kath lets slip. This is part of the charm of Never Let Me Go. So far I have decerned that Ruth is the chief of the group. She leads their imaginative adventures, and she enjoys determining who is 'in' and who isn't.

While it is easy to see how Ruth is rather rough, bossy and, if I'm honest, a bit of a bully, Kath also reveals Ruth's softer, more loyal side as she describes how Ruth tried to help her after she'd lost her favorite tape. Ruth says, "'Kath, it's not your one. The one you lost. I tried to find it for you, but it's really gone.' I saw how, to Ruth, this tape might easily make up for the one I'd lost. We didn't do things like hug each other much at Hailsham. But I squeezed one of her hands in both of mine"(68). This passage demonstrates how Ruth wanted to make her friend happy and help Kath at her own expense. This scene also reveals how carefully Kath reveals details about Hailsham, her home, where you don't hug people. The details are thrown in casually, like the details about her friends, they are never introduced formally or made to look important, just mentioned in Kath's narrative as she recounts her childhood directly to the reader.

However, this type of casual description isn't used for all the characters. Adults are characterized differently than Kath's friends. Each time that a new guardian is introduced there is very straightforward characterization, like when Kath describes Miss Geraldine. "Miss Geraldine was everyone's favorite guardian when we were that age. She was gentle, soft-spoken, and always comforted you when you needed it, even when you'd done something bad"(18).  Here it is clear exactly who the character is and how they act. Another important guardian is Miss Lucy, who is introduced and described as being 'the most sporting of the guardians' though she doesn't look it. Miss Lucy helps Tommy as he struggles with his creativity, and from Kath's hints, it appears that Miss Lucy is close to losing her cool and revealing some big secrets.

The straightforward description of the guardians adds to the informal feel of the book, Kath assumes the reader is more familiar with her friends and doesn't bother describing them because they appear naturally in her memory and she is more familiar with them. But Kath feels the need to describe the guardians because they are a part of her past, and authority figures. Of course, this is just my opinion because it is still unclear where the novel is heading, but I am doing my best to take note of the foreshadowing and take guesses as to what sort of dystopian society will soon be revealed.