Memory In Never Let Me Go

Written by British author Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go depicts a dystopian world where human clones were raised in special schools and were taught to stay healthy at all times. The main purpose of their existence was to have their organs harvested and donated to regular citizens in the rest of the country. The narrator of the novel, Kathy H., who was one of the human clones, was an unreliable, first person narrator. As opposed to an omniscient narrator (also known as the God narrator), Kathy neither knows everything nor has the most accurate memories. This characteristic makes her a great example to display the fact that "Memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves” (Schacter 6) This paper argues that one 's

In Chapter seven, there was again another contradiction in memory between Ruth and Kathy. It was also a conversation between the two at the centre in Dover. In the conversation, they were arguing whether Miss Lucy had told the students about their future back in the days. Ruth, according to Kathy’s memory, claimed that Miss Lucy "had told us (the students) a lot more; that she 'd explained how before donations we 'd all spend some time first as carers, about the usual sequence of the donations, the recovery centres and so on — but I’m (Kathy) pretty sure she didn’t.” The event itself must have stayed the same the entire time — what had been said had been said. The only reason why there was such a discrepancy in memory between Ruth and Kathy is that they experienced the same event differently. It could be that they focused on different aspect of the speech given by Miss Lucy; or one of them was just simply remembered wrongly. The truth was not confirmed by any external evidence, but this blank in the story keeps the reader interested in the student’s future and helps the story