"At a complete loss for words": Silence and animal language as means of expression in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Details

Supervisors

Bertrand, Ingrid

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

enKazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a dystopian novel depicting a society in which clones are created to donate their vital organs to "normal people", a subject that inevitably generates haunting questions such as What is a human being? or What allows some organisms to deserve this privileged status? My study intends to focus on the narration of the novel (a first-person narrative offering the perspective of a clone) in order to demonstrate that Kathy, as an active narrator, manages to dismantle the system that exploits clones on the basis that they are "less than human" by implicitly establishing her humanity throughout the story. The analysis, therefore, consists in the disentanglement of the strategies used by the narrator to allow the reader to empathise with an artificial form of life. The study shows that, contrary to what most critics argue, Kathy is far from being passive but that her rehumanising project involves the use of means of expression underrated by our Western society. Kathy manages to gain power and to convince her addressee through her clever use of silence and animal language.