Purity in a malevolent harvest : Ustopianism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s never let me go (2005)‎

Abstract EN

In a continuous search for perfection, it is possible that one day human body organs will be harvested.

This is the premise of the dystopian novel Never Let Me Go by the Japanese-born British author and Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro.

The novel provides a possible fate of the human race in the event that we keep chasing longevity.

It depicts an English school in the 1990s in which children are farmed for their organs.

Such children are conceived only for scientific purposes and they are not told that they are clones or that the only purpose for their existence is to donate their organs after becoming young adults.

Applying Margaret Atwood’s term ‘ustopia,’ a term coined through merging the two terms ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ that highlights features these terms have in common, to Ishiguro’s novel, this paper aims to shed light on the elements of utopia within Ishiguro’s dystopianism.

I claim that Never Let Me Go, besides serving as a warning, provides hope through questioning the concept of absolute evil and focusing on the idea that there has to be some degree of goodness even in apparently evil situations.