Cloned: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Cloned: The Body as Parts & Human Apathy – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go general apathy is expressed as a prevailing symptom of a society that places importance on parts of bodies and their uses rather than the life of a body as a whole. The novel depicts a dystopian world in which clones are created for the sole purpose of harvesting their vital organs to cure the illnesses of normal humans. The apathy, indifference and cold acceptance displayed by the clones towards their own grim futures is a clone of normal peoples’ own apathy, indifference and acceptance of the life and death of the clones they exploit. Various mechanisms are employed to provide distinctions between clones and humans, distinctions

Levy states that “The subversion of empathetic response occurs not only because normal citizens can’t stomach knowledge of atrocity but also because they recognize how the entitlements they enjoy have a direct connection to the suffering of others” (14). The subversion of empathetic response Levy describes is indifference and apathy towards injustices against a group that benefits another. Levy is arguing that normal humans cannot feel empathy towards the clones because they would then have to consciously cope with the reality that they enable the inhuman treatment of others for only their gain. The normal people of this society cannot consciously face this reality therefore they construct a narrative, an ideology, which enables them to fixate on real and imagined distinctions on what truly makes a human,

At the same time it calls into question the ways in which people enable the exploitation of others. In Shameem Black’s article, Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics, Black explores the use of the apathetic voice, or the inhuman aesthetic in Ishiguro’s novel. He does this in contrast with the humanist approach authors of other similar works employ to provoke empathy from the reader and engage them in careful consideration of current real exploitations of people. Black claims: “As an alternative to humanist modes of representation, Ishiguro's inhuman style suggests that only by recognizing what in ourselves is mechanical, manufactured, and replicated—in a traditional sense, not fully human—will we escape the barbarities committed in the name of preserving purely human life” (786). Black implies that Kathy H.’s apathetic voice is used by Ishiguro in an effort to illustrate the artificiality in all humans and the imperative need for its recognition of the end of human exploitation. The distinctions implied throughout the novel create an ideology that favours the perceived value of pure humans. Through the use of terms that diminish the value of the whole in a body of parts, the clones internalize