Never Let Me Go Euphemism

The novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro has been called the “banality of evil” by many of its readers although it does not even delve into the gruesome horrific details that are below the surface meaning of the book. This is a novel about cloning humans and harvesting their organs to benefit the rest of society. Never Let Me Go is written as a flashback in the perspective of a female clone named Kathy H. She has been raised in a special boarding school called Hailsham which was made to be a more humane way of raising these copies. The world in the is novel manages to trivialize the human sacrifice occurring with the use of an art gallery, euphemisms, and detaching the clones from the general public. Although it may seem as though the downplaying

Throughout the book there are many of these quick diversions from the truth that make the impending events seem significantly less gruesome. Instead of calling them clones or sacrifices they were called students or donors. They were called donors because this world called the harvesting of these children’s organs donations. The problem with this is that the world “donate” implies that what is being donated is given up by choice, which it clearly is not. Another euphemism that is used in this book was “unzipping.” When Kathy was a young girl at Hailsham, they had a belief that when they were ready to donate all they had to do “when the time came, [would be] to unzip a bit of [themselves], [and] a kidney or something would fall out, and [they’d] hand it over” (88). They had come up with this unrealistic theory to avoid thinking of the pain that they knew they would eventually endure which is hard to comprehend as a young child. Therefore, although these euphemisms were used to reduce the fear of the students and to minimize the general populations guilt in the novel, they were also a way for the author to create the erie feeling of the downplayed horror for the

All of their boarding school homes no matter how nice they are, are placed in reclusive areas far from large cities or where the majority of the population is located. This is because people who are not clones fear them. When Kathy and Tommy questioned Miss. Emily as to why Madame hates them, her answer was “we’re all afraid of you. I myself had to back my dread of you almost every day I… I’d look down at you all from my study window and I’d feel such revulsion” (269). This was the feeling of someone who raised these children and knew who they were as people but still found them repulsive which means the rest of the country could only think lower of them and want them as far away as possible. The students were not allowed to leave Hailsham until they were around sixteen and were sent to another hidden place to live before they started their work and their donations. Only then were they allowed to go out into the real world and experience the closest thing to a normal life they would have. Another way that the general population found a way to segregate the clones from themselves was with the job that every clone would have before going into donations. After living in their second home for a while, every clone was to work as a carer for others that are in the process of donating. A carer was essentially a nurse but with less of the required training and it must be a clone. This was