History and culture of Never Let Me Go

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Recommended: Short note on Eugenics

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let me Go uses a dystopian fantasy world to illustrate the author's view that our real world practice of eugenics is as equally immoral and degrading as the world he describes. The eugenic-soaked world of Never Let me Go is dystopian, and our real world, with its quiet adoption of 'soft' eugenics, is equally dystopian. Ishiguro's point is that utopia can never be attained in either realm if it contains the contagion of eugenics. By depicting unfair struggles that eugenics rigged "pre-destination" imposes on his oh so human characters, Ishiguro portrays the Eugenist's utopian wet dream as a nightmarish perversion of humanity's social contract. By extinguishing the natural rights of the few for the wellbeing of the majority, using the lame justification of fundamental innate superiority, eugenics comes to violate the legitimacy of government both in the novel and here in the real world. Ishiguro's bureaucrats adopt the role of God, passing laws that establish degrees of humanity and degrees of human worth. American legislators pass laws that establish the degrees of humanity of a fetus and degrees of human worth through prenatal genetic testing. This science fiction reality where all men are deemed to be created UNequal is the fantasy of eugenics. It is also the cold, clinical, world of Never Let Me Go, Nazi Germany, Industrial Europe and even today’s modern world.

Never Let Me Go is a world of selective, culturally accepted discrimination, in which society is capable of considering some humans as equal to livestock. Such culturalization of discrimination has frightening social implications, as the term "the society that burns books will soon burn people" has an equally true inverse; devaluin...

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...Miss Lucy’s expulsion from Halisham for telling the clones that they would be “harvested for your organs” (page 81) rather than “donated”. This cold new industrial world was the Romantics nightmare, Ishuguro’s inspiration and the destitute’s reality; industrialization has enhanced humanities overall well being by enriching first world society at the third’s expense. While fortune empowers the receiving ends demands and opportunity, those inherently trapped within economics dismal science are like the clones that enter their donations with futures as predictable as their premature death; just as helpless as their vain outcry for help “never let me go”.

Works Cited

Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro

1984- George Orwell

Frankenstein- Mary Shelly

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/12/18/2857794/i-cant-help-but-think-about-it.html

The Communist Manifesto- Karl Marx

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