Never Let Me Go Symbolism Essay

Ishiguro concludes the final pages of Never Let Me Go with a short narrative describing Kathy’s attempts at finding peace. In this excerpt, Kathy embarks on many journeys to her childhood homes and reminisces about her past. She spends time admiring nature and thinking about her relationships with her friends. In this passage, Kazuo Ishiguro employs several motific elements that are mentioned throughout the text. He chooses to end the novel in this manner to explain how Kathy comes to terms with her impending death. Ishiguro claims that Kathy confronts her end by trying to find the most meaningful moments and from there, assessing whether or not her life was full. By making various connections between clones and humans throughout the novel,

He does this to highlight the fact that Kathy compresses many aspects about her life into that passage, just like how he did with the novel. Earlier on in the novel, the term “rubbish” is used to describe the clones’ existence: they are modeled off the worst humans in society, and they find happiness in pieces of junk such as the items from the Exchanges. In these last few pages, when Kathy sees a piece of garbage, she “half-closed [her] eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything [she’d] ever lost since [her] childhood had washed up” (287). This quote emphasizes how Kathy has come full circle and is connected to the beginning of the novel. She replays the memories of her childhood and seeks the bliss that she felt back then to assure herself that her life was well-lived. In addition, in this passage, Kathy adopts a speaking style that is void of emotion and passion. After Kathy has finished crying because she imagined Tommy, she “just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be” (288). In this excerpt, Ishiguro emphasizes the phrase “supposed to be”, suggesting that Kathy has accepted her fate as a donor. She seems hopeless and detached to her death. This mannerism is similar to the one that she speaks in at the beginning of the novel. In the beginning, she is also passive and distant from the reader. Thus, Kathy replicates her actions in the beginning of the novel as a way of compressing her life into a few of her final moments. By including elements that have been presented to the reader multiple times, Ishiguro connects the way he ended the novel to how humans deal with their deaths. Before our end, we reflect on our lives to determine whether we lived a fulfilling life or