Never Let Me Go: A Comparative Analysis

Kathy H and her fellow students are clones, identical to their possible except for a genetic modification making them sterile. They raise without further elaboration the question of whether the putative rights of animals ought not to include the right to an autonomous sexual life and the right to parenthood as god intended. At the end of the novel, Kathy and her friend Tommy pay a visit to a “guardian” from Hailsham named Miss Emily, in which Miss Emily explains the students’ lives to them historically. At this level, Ishiguro's novel may be read alongside texts such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and so on, as presenting a familiar critique of applied science: that technology moves faster than human ethical and political deliberation, often with ethically disastrous results. See Tsao's “The Tyranny of Purpose” for more on Never Let Me Go's relation to Frankenstein. Although questions arise in the course of technology's use, in its future as it were. The technology of cloning in Never Let Me Go is a practice of dominion, of using technology as a means to an end. In Never Let Me Go, the event that finally produces questions about the biotechnical practice of cloning is an experiment by a man named Morningdale who clones beings with superior intelligence, superior athleticism, that sort of thing. Explaining the public response to Morningdale's experiments, Miss Emily suggests a heuristic

More humane would then mean, in a first reading, taking the students/clones as human beings. This is how Miss Emily presents it: “for a long time you were kept in the shadows. In Miss Emily's presentation, Hailsham's political mission is the humanization of the students through securing recognition of their humanity from the outside