"Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes": The Ethics of Grievance in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

What is it about?

A close examination of the ethical situation of the characters in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go reveals troubling truths about how we navigate the problems of grievance, which is to say, of the harm that we inevitably cause to certain members of our communities. In this article, I use ethical analysis to challenge a widely-held presumption that the appearance of markers of inferiority is a precondition to the infliction of harm. Ishiguro's novel reverses this sequence, suggesting that the harm comes first, and that the community will then subsequently impose visible marks of inferiority upon the one they have singled out for misery.

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Why is it important?

Representing the plight of the radically aggrieved is extremely difficult. It often involves telling a story that few potential readers want to read. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro brilliantly capitalizes on the mechanisms of fiction to slip a story of ethical atrocity beneath the noses of escapist readers in order to shock them with an ice-cold dose of reality over a series of sudden, shocking revelations. While many critics have examined Ishiguro's technique, I wanted to supplement these examinations with more emphasis on the challenges and necessities of telling this sort of story and of using the escapist realm of fiction to do so.

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