‘Like’-similes in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let Me Go

What is it about?

Kathy’s 1st-person narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go depicts the relationships among three leading characters, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who live in a near-contemporary world, where (we slowly grasp) some human clones are raised to be a source of replacement organs for noncloned humans in ill health. Kathy and her friends are three such clones. Figurative expressions in Kathy’s narrative tend to appear in the form of similes or with explicit markers of similitude such as ‘like’ and ‘the sort’, and the frequency of ‘like’ is particularly high. The primary focus of this paper is to examine the effects which are achieved by ‘like’-similes and how they contribute to constructing the fictional world of the novel. ‘Like’ is used here with syntactic flexibility and semantic versatility and these ‘like’-similes are predominantly used to describe the characters’ actions, intentions, emotions and the situations in which they act. As the three friends grow older and approach the final phase of their lives, when they will be organ donors, the characters’ viewpoints and the narrator’s presentation of them shift. Through an array of ‘like’-similes, the 1stperson narrator consistently interprets other characters’ internal states and signals the way she is making assumptions about them and the surrounding environments.

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