While Never Let Me Go explores the theme of mortality, I want to explore the acceptance that the characters experience. Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy are clones that have known for their entire lives that they have limited time. Instead of attempting to escape their reality, they submit to their fate.
Their acceptance begins at a very young age. The characters are only fifteen when Miss Lucy is direct about the clones' future. She says “Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do” (Ishiguro 81). I would have expected a strong reaction from any of the students, but there was none. This shows their acceptance of mortality and future. Prior to this discussion with Miss Lucy, some students had discussed what jobs they wanted to have after Hailsham. After being told about their future, no weight was ever again put into these alternative futures. I believe this strong acceptance comes from not knowing any other future. The students were not taught to have hopes, dreams, or goals. This made it easier to accept the life laid out for them.
One could argue that since the students were so young, they did not grasp Miss Lucy’s explanation. However, their acceptance is seen later in the book when discussing deferrals. It is mentioned that “You can ask for your donations to be put back by three, even four years” (Ishiguro 153). When discussing the deferrals, the students look at it as a way of living for a few more years and not a way of avoiding their fate. All of this comes back to how the students were raised. Even though the cottages are closer to “the real world”, the students did not have the foundation to think they could be anything other than donors and carers. The only time this mentality is challenged is when Ruth dreams of working in an open-plan office. However, this was never an explicitly sought after dream. Ruth never attempted to take steps to working in the office. This again drives home the point of the acceptance of mortality.
For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Never Let Me Go was the characters’ complete acceptance of their fate despite the entirely real possibility of one day simply running off and escaping their lives. I believe that this acceptance has everything to do with the way they were raised at Hailsham. As you’ve mentioned, Miss Lucy is the only adult who is entirely direct to the students about the life ahead of them, at one point shutting down their impossible dreams. However, Miss Lucy mysteriously leaves Hailsham soon after. It is only at the end of the novel that we learn exactly why this occurs.
ReplyDeleteMiss Emily mentions how Miss Lucy believed that students should be made “more aware of what lay ahead for [them]” (Ishiguro 267). However, the other administrators believe her to be mistaken. The fundamental belief at Hailsham was that students should be sheltered from the truth of their lives. Miss Emily claims that Miss Lucy was nothing more than “idealistic… but she had no grasp of practicalities” (268). The ultimate goal of Hailsham’s model was to carefully ease students into accepting their lives as donors. As you’ve mentioned, the students weren’t taught any other future than the one already decided for them. It was not practical to have students made aware of any other life, as they were predestined to “complete” before a normal person would.