Never Let Me Go Lesson 5

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Never Let Me Go

Lesson 5

Symbolism

In class today

Symbolism

Recap & analysis Chapters 9-12

What is "symbolism"?

Common Examples of Symbolism in Everyday Life:

• The dove is a symbol of peace.
• A red rose, or the color red, stands for love or romance.
• Black is a symbol that represents evil or death.
• A ladder may stand as a symbol for a connection between heaven and earth.
• A broken mirror may symbolize separation.

Symbolism

Symbolism is the use of symbols (an object or a word) to represent ideas and qualities, by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense.

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 - The song 'Never Let me Go' 
• Creativity
• Tommy's Drawings
• Madame's Gallery
• The Lost Corner / Norfolk

• Hailsham. Hailsham symbolizes the idea that clones are human beings, not just medical procedures. The guardians at Hailsham treat the children well and teach them to take care of each other. By having them create art, they show the world that the clones have souls and are therefore human beings. Buying each other's work demonstrates that clones have an appreciation for individual beauty. Each child gravitates toward a different type of art, both the act of making it and the act of appreciating it. For the clones who did not go there, Hailsham represents the idea that some clones have more privileges than others. They believe that the Hailsham students get to have deferrals for their donations if they can show that they are in a couple and are truly in love. Chrissie and Rodney want Ruth to keep talking about her desires in her future life so that she'll tell them how she and Tommy will get a deferral. The donor Kathy has at the beginning of the novel wants to hear Hailsham stories so that he can experience them vicariously as well. People don't know exactly how the Hailsham students are special, but Kathy realizes that they are special because their guardians believe they are humans deserving of respect and love. The guardians treat them accordingly and Kathy finds out that her experiences at Hailsham are not the norm for clones. The real Hailsham is a town in East Sussex, in the southeastern part of England. It began as a medieval market town and continues to be surrounded by rural farmland. The importance of farming and bringing livestock to market, as well as the later addition of ropemaking mills, eerily echo the plot of the novel. The Hailsham students are, in essence, livestock raised for their organs. Though in Hailsham the school, they are treated like human beings with souls. They are, however, irrevocably tied to their fate, which not even the most ardent supporters of their humanity can change. 
• Song “Never Let Me Go". As a child at Hailsham, Kathy acquires a cassette tape of the Judy Bridgewater album Songs after Dark at one of the Sales. Her favorite track on the album, “Never Let Me Go,” gives the novel its title. The song symbolizes both the depths of human love and the fear of losing those whom one loves. This becomes clear in the story that Kathy invents to explain the song’s lyrics. Kathy imagines that the song is about a woman afraid of losing her baby. Holding tightly to the child, she sings a song that expresses her happiness as well as her fear of loss. This image of holding on recurs several times in the novel, most notably when Kathy and Tommy hold one another in the field after learning that deferrals do not exist. When the tape itself disappears, Kathy has her first experience of loss that presages the losses she will later experience on a much larger and more human scale.
• Creativity and art. In Never Let Me Go, the equation goes like this: being creative = being human. You can't have one without the other. It might sound harsh, but not everyone believes that clones like Kathy count as "human." So Miss Emily and Madame use art to prove that Hailsham students have souls just like the rest of us. This means that it's super important for the students at Hailsham to produce good artwork. Even though they don't know it, their status as "human" is at stake with each poem they write and painting they create.
• Tommy's drawings. Tommy makes extremely detailed drawings of imaginary animals, and the drawings are very good. Their intricacy and originality come as a surprise to Kathy when she sees them because Tommy has shown no previous interest in creativity. The drawings represent the depths of Tommy's soul and come from Tommy's strong belief in the rumor that art will lead him and a lover to defer their donations. The need to impress Madame with the quality of his soul makes him pull out all the stops and create. Ruth makes fun of the drawings, and Kathy goes along with Ruth but feels terrible. She later tells Tommy his drawings are wonderful. Kathy's love of the drawings and Ruth's dismissal of them make it clear to the reader that Kathy loves Tommy. When Tommy and Kathy find out later that the rumor is not true, Tommy stops drawing for the most part but doesn't completely quit. His continuing to draw shows that his creations, and the need to create them, are actually much more than a way to make a relationship last longer. They are an expression of who Tommy is inside: complicated and intricate, carefully crafted.
  
• Madame's Gallery. Madame's rumored gallery represents the ideas children have and spread that are not necessarily true but still have a grain of truth. The students realize Madame is taking the best examples of their art, making them think that others must be seeing it in a gallery. Later, Tommy believes the souls represented by the art help Madame decide who belongs with whom, romantically. For Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy, as well as Chrissie and Rodney, the gallery represents a chance at being able to experience and enjoy a love relationship, just as people who are not clones are allowed to do.
• The Lost Corner / Norfolk. One of the characteristics of the novel’s structure is a pattern of losing and finding, both of people and objects. The primary place both of losing and finding is Norfolk, the seaside town in a “lost corner” of England, as explained in a geography class by the guardians to the students of Hailsham. Although this is primarily meant to imply that Norfolk isn’t easily accessible by motorway, Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy interpret it to mean, more whimsically, that Norfolk is the place in England to which all lost things are sent to be collected. When Kathy finds that her Judy Bridgewater tape has been taken from her footlocker, she wonders if it might not have “found” its way to Norfolk—even though she knows this is highly unlikely. Much later, at the Cottages, when Chrissie, Rodney, Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy decide to take a trip to Norfolk—and after the group realizes that Ruth has not in fact found her “possible”—Tommy and Kathy go off to a second-hand store, and do in fact find a copy of this tape. More than the magic of Norfolk, which Kathy realizes to be a fantasy, this moment with Tommy forms a bond that allows them to “find” each other much later in the novel, as Ruth’s health falters and she recommends that Kathy serve as Tommy’s carer. Couples in the novel, too, are deeply concerned that they will lose one another once they are assigned as carers and then forced to be donors. Chrissie and Rodney bring up the idea that perhaps a postponement is possible for Hailsham students, although Tommy, Ruth and Kathy have never heard of such a thing. And Tommy does his best to work on his “animals” so that his donations, or art projects, might “match up” with those of the love of his life—whom he initially believes to be Ruth, but then realizes is Kathy. Finally, two larger, more abstract concepts are “lost”—Hailsham, and the notion of the characters’ innocence more broadly. Hailsham is closed in the middle of the novel, after Kathy and her friends have left and moved on to the Cottages and their lives as carers and donors. Although Kathy does not know, at first, why Hailsham is closed, it is later revealed that Hailsham was an “experiment” in a certain kind of compassionate, school-like environment for clones. The shuttering of Hailsham, therefore, represents English society losing its sense of the humanity of clones. Tommy and Kathy, on hearing this, are struck with a double-layered sadness: they know that Hailsham is not coming back, and that no “postponements” are possible for clones; and they realize what Hailsham actually was, a holding-area for clones until they were old enough to serve as carers and donors. But despite losing these stories and rationalizations, which had made their lives more bearable, Kathy finds that her memories and joys at Hailsham remain real and true, that the lie of the place did not alter the truth and humanity of her experience there.

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. 

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. 

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 surrogate 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 other 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.

Never Let Me Go

Read Chapters 15-18 for our next meeting.