On not wanting to know: Some thoughts on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novel Never Let Me Go takes place, as the author tells us in ‘England, the late 1990s’ and follows the lives of a group of clones who had been created with the sole purpose of harvesting their organs for transplant. The novel is steeped in an atmosphere of illusion and self-deception while remaining deeply rooted in human emotions. I argue that to some extent it represents all of us, our illusions and self-deceptions. At another level, however, I argue that the novel is a sharp critique of a culture of narcissism and self-interest where human beings are treated as commodities, while creating the illusion that they are special and that ‘they never had it so good’, a saying from another time when self-deception was equally promoted. The paper concentrates on one aspect of this multilayered novel—the misrepresentation of reality and the human wish not to know about painful truths, but instead to create an illusory world. It examines this aspect of the novel in terms of the current neoliberal framework, and the culture of illusion that it promotes by ignoring the violence that underlies it. In particular, it examines how this pervasive aspect of contemporary culture affects the ability of the individual to ask questions and to pursue the truth, what Bion called ‘K.’