Never Let Me Go Lesson 5-6

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Never Let Me Go

Lesson 5-6

In Class Today

Symbolism

Summary & Analysis of chapters 7-9

Summary & Analysis of chapters 10-13

What is "symbolism"?

Symbolism

Symbolism is the practice or art of using an object or a word to represent an abstract idea. 

An action, person, place, word, or object can all have a symbolic meaning.

In your reading: 

Have you discovered anything you think might be a "symbol" for something else?

Possible Symbols in "Never Let Me Go"

• Hailsham
• Judy Bridgewater Tape
• Creativity
• Tommy's Drawings
• Madame's Gallery
• The Lost Corner

What Happened in Chapter 7?

Chapter 7 - Summary

Kathy conissiders her conversation with Tommy by the pond, when they were thirteen, to be the “marker” between eras at Hailsham. 

Before this time was a “golden period” when the worries of the world did not intrude, but afterward, Kathy and the other students began to realize that their lives were predetermined, and that their time after Hailsham would not be so idyllic as it was there. 

Chapter 7 - Summary

In a conversation with some students Miss Lucy seemed to acknowledge that, perhaps at other “schools” like Hailsham, electric fences were used to keep students in. 

Chapter 7 - Analysis

This remark points to the world outside Hailsham. Specifically, it makes Hailsham and that world seem entirely at odds. 

The students aren’t  at an elite boarding or prep school—they are something like prisoners, even if they are kept in a pleasant environment. And they will remain prisoners for the rest of their lives—even though they technically have some freedom of movement—their future is determined.

Chapter 7 - Summary

At one point Miss Lucy is the only guardian watching them; some of the students are discussing their dream jobs after Hailsham, and one says he’d like to move to America to pursue an acting career. But Lucy stops him before he can go any further, and tells the assembled students she has some things to say to them.

What does Miss Lucy tell them?

What do we learn about who/what the students are?

Chapter 7 - Summary

Lucy tells the students that none of them will be going to America, none will have acting careers: she tells them that, instead, their lives have one purpose, which is: 

Their bodies will be used for the harvesting of organs, which they will donate until they die. 

Chapter 7 - Analysis

Lucy feels she can no longer pretend that Hailsham students are just like “normal” students, and that their futures resemble normal “human” futures. 

To Lucy, it is far more humane for Hailsham guardians to talk about the students’ actual futures, rather than to obscure their jobs under abstract talk of “giving” and “rule-following.”

Chapter 7 - Analysis

In a novel like The Hunger Games, at this point the students would rebel and seek freedom. But Ishiguro is after something different in this novel. 

The students hear the news of their lack of freedom and rather than revolt they just kind of accept it, because they've always sort of known it, and prefer to avoid thinking about it. 

Chapter 7 - Analysis

The students come to be an extreme representation (symbol) of all people: after all, everyone is going to die eventually, everyone's freedom is constrained in that way, and most people life their ordinary lives by just not thinking about that aspect of their future. 

Chapter 7 - Analysis

The students learn that they are: 

clones, 

and then just go on living.

Chapter 7 - Analysis

Tommy shows a large amount of self-knowledge, and a great deal of astuteness regarding the educational system at Hailsham. The other students, who consider Tommy a bit “slow,” don’t catch on to Hailsham’s strategies for some time. 

However, Tommy knows that Hailsham wanted to educate a group of willing clones, who had no qualms donating their organs, as efficiently and humanely as possible. 

But what about this focus on creativity?

Chapter 8 - Summary

Kathy mentions that other students begin having very obvious sex lives, and that Hailsham rules seemed rather ambiguous as regarded sex. 

Ruth and Tommy had become an “item,” although their relationship was somewhat tumultuous, and Tommy appeared more withdrawn than he had in years—almost as sullen as he was when he was throwing temper tantrums.

Chapter 8 - Summary

 Kathy resolved that she herself would begin having sex, and picked a boy, Henry, as her intended “mate,” not because she liked him, but because she might “practice with him.” 

Kathy also wondered how exactly the other students were having so much sex. Kathy wonders whether Hailsham students at the time weren’t exaggerating the nature of their sex lives to seem “cool.”

Chapter 8 - Analysis

Teenagers have sex

What happened in chapter 9?

Chapter 9 - Summary

Kathy discovers that she has feelings for Tommy beyond friendship. 

Ruth and Tommy have broken up but Ruth confesses to Kathy that she thinks she had made a mistake in breaking up with Tommy.

Ruth asks Kathy to "talk some sense" into Tommy. 

This creates a dilemma for Kathy because she also likes Tommy. In the end Kathy agrees to talk to tommy for Ruth.  

Chapter 9 - Summary

In her conversation with Tommy he reveals that Miss Lucy told him that she had made a mistake, years earlier, in telling Tommy that his creativity didn’t matter—that it did in fact matter, “and not just as evidence, but for Tommy himself.” 

Tommy and Kathy are both perplexed by these finals words—they do not see how their art could be used as “evidence,” and they wonder what kind of value it would have for themselves

Chapter 9 - Analysis

What is possible is that someone in the Hailsham administration “spoke to” Lucy about her “outburst” with the students, perhaps reminding Lucy that her primary job at the school is to protect and care for the clones. 

What is striking here however is again the emphasis on creativity making the reader ask him/herself again why creativity is so important for the students.

In effect the reader has the same questions as the protagonists have. 

Never Let Me Go

Lesson 6 

In Class Today

Summary & Analysis of chapters 10-13

Mood

What happened in chapter 10?

Chapter 10 - Summary 

Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and several others from Hailsham are sent to The Cottages which, like several other communities around the UK, are designed to house smaller groups of students from many schools, not just Hailsham, and to prepare them for their lives as carers and donors. 

Kathy reflects also on the older students who had already been at the Cottages one year, when Kathy and her friends arrived—they are called “the veterans,” and seem startlingly mature compared to Kathy’s cohort.

Chapter 10 - Analysis

If Hailsham is the clones’ equivalent of high school, then the Cottages are most similar to college. There, the clones have the kinds of freedom one might expect of a 16 to 20-year-old. 

Chapter 10 - Analysis

The Cottages are less structured than Hailsham, and the students become more aware of the outside world, and of their place in it. The few skills they learn while at the Cottages have immediately to do with their soon-to-be jobs

Chapter 10 - analysis

Kathy sees that Ruth, more than Tommy, is eager to show how “mature” and “grown up” she is at the Cottages. 

This means emulating those who have been at the Cottages before. What Ruth does not realize—but Kathy does—is that these gestures are in fact taken from television, and other forms of pop culture.

Ruth is, in a sense, imitating a version of “real life” that she can never have.

What happened in chapter 11?

Chapter 11 - Summary 

• In this chapter Kathy seems to be truly exploring her sexuality and has different sexual encounters with some of the other students at The Cottage's. 
• At one point Tommy finds Kathy staring intently at some pornographic magazines which confuses Tommy. 
• Kathy tells Tommy she was looking at them out of curiousity. 

Chapter 11 - analysis

Kathy feels there is something “wrong” with her sexuality or her body—that her desires for sex are unnatural or more intense than others around her.

Only later will Tommy figure out exactly why Kathy is so interested in her body—because Kathy wonders, like all the other clones, who her “original” or clone parent might be.

What happened in chapter 12?

Chapter 12 - Summary

During the first winter of their time at the Cottages, Ruth pulls Kathy aside and tells her, excitedly, that Chrissie and Rodney might have spotted a “possible” for Ruth 

Kathy tells the reader that a “possible” is the slang word for a potential “clone parent” for one of the clones—meaning, in other words, the potential model from which the cloned DNA was originally taken

Chapter 12 - Analysis

The clones are alone in the world, without pasts or uncertain futures. The idea of a "possible" is exciting because it offers a glimpse at both of these things: the "possible" is both a kind of parent and also offers the clone a glimpse of a vicariously lived life. 

Chapter 12 - Summary

One day, Ruth and Kathy were on a walk, and Ruth spotted a magazine advertisement showing a happy group of people working in a glass-walled office. 

Ruth noted that that job seemed like a marvelous way to spend one’s life, and she began to describe her dream around the Cottages.

Chapter 12 - Analysis

This passage shows Ruth's  desperate willingness to appear more “in the know” than her fellow Hailsham students and Cottage residents.

For Ruth, working in an office is the epitome of a “normal” adult lifestyle

But only Kathy seems to realize that Ruth’s ideas of this “sophistication” are drawn simply from ads—from stylized images of adult life

Chapter 12 Summary

Chrissie, Rodney, Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy decide to take a day-long fieldtrip to Norfolk in order to track down Ruth’s possible. 

During this trip it becomes clear that the pther students seemed to think that Hailsham students received special treatment, fundamentally different from that given to the other clones.

Chapter 12 - analysis

other clones seem to think that the Hailsham clones might continue to get better treatment in the future. Thus, if there is any hope of deferral, or of special treatment for clones, it must originate with Hailsham students—the most special among them.

Mood

 In literature, mood is a literary element that evokes certain feelings or vibes in readers through words and descriptions. Usually, mood is referred to as the atmosphere of a literary piece, as it creates an emotional setting that surrounds the readers.

What type of mood does the author create throughout the novel?