Never Let Me Go Lesson 4

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Never Let Me Go

Lesson 4

Recap & analysis Chapters 5-6

Recap & analysis Chapters 7-8

Foreshadowing

Analysis Chapter 5-6

Like Hailsham itself, Ruth’s secret guard operates on the principles of secrecy and investigation. Its members endlessly collect “evidence” of a secret but vague plot, shielding their theories from other students and guardians. 

In the same way, Hailsham students piece together the guardians’ veiled hints and references in order to understand the “plot” that governs their lives. 

Analysis Chapter 5-6

The “secret guard” allows Ruth to play out a fantasy of control. The guard lets the students imagine themselves as “guardians” who protect Miss Geraldine and hold secret information. 

The secret guard also gives the students a privileged, if make-believe, connection to Miss Geraldine, a guardian beloved for her kindness. 

Analysis Chapter 5-6

Ruth’s devotion to Miss Geraldine contrasts with Tommy’s curiosity about Miss Lucy. 

While Ruth makes up evidence for her bond with Miss Geraldine, 

Tommy uses the evidence from his conversation with Miss Lucy to theorize about the mysterious link between donations and creativity. 

Analysis Chapter 5-6

The students’ fears about the woods convey a more general sense of foreboding about what lies beyond the familiar walls of Hailsham.

Like much of their knowledge, what the students know of the woods comes largely from rumor and speculation. Yet the terrible stories about children who leave Hailsham also foreshadow the students’ own futures. 

Analysis Chapter 5-6

Kathy returns to the story of losing her tape "Songs after Dark", which she notes has Judy Bridgewater holding a cigarette on the cover. She keeps the tape hidden at Hailsham because the students are told they must stay perfectly healthy and are explicitly forbidden from smoking.  

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Analysis Chapter 5-6

One day, Kathy is singing along to the song and swaying her pillow like a baby. When the song ends, she sees Madame watching her from the hallway.  Madame is crying, and leaves abruptly. 

Tommy theorizes that Madame cried because she knew the students could not have babies

“Never Let Me Go” evokes the deeply human impulse to hold onto loved ones in the face of losing them

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story. Foreshadowing often appears at the beginning of a story, or a chapter, and helps the reader develop expectations about the coming events in a story. There are various ways to create foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing in 

Never Let Me Go

"'All I can tell you today is that it's for a good reason. A very important reason. But if I tried to explain it to you now, I don't think you'd understand. One day, I hope, it'll be explained to you'" (Ch.4, p.40).

This quote is being said by Miss Lucy, one of the guardians, who is well liked and trusted by the students. She often says weird things about the students not knowing something, or not being told enough. She said this quote in response to Polly asking her why Madame takes some of their creations. Miss Lucy wasn't going to tell them why, but she was foreshadowing that they will find out eventually and that it's important. She uses hints and clues to suggest what will happen later. The more I read the more I realize that something is definitely different about this school and maybe even these kids. Kathy and her friends are starting to recognize that there are several things that happen that they don't understand, but for some reason they don't try to find out answers. It is like there are unwritten/unsaid rules that some topics should just not be discussed by the students, so they feel uncomfortable trying to figure out unknown questions about the school.

Analysis Chapter 7 

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. 

Kathy’s last years at Hailsham are filled with foreboding signs, and Miss Lucy’s odd behavior contributes heavily to the ominous atmosphere.

Analysis Chapter 7 

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. 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.

Analysis Chapter 7 

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?

"'If no one else will talk to you,' she continued, 'then I will. the problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understands, and I dare say,  some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I'm not. If you're going to have decent lives, then you've got to know and know properly. ... You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. So you're not to talk that way any more. You'll be leaving Hailsham before long, and it's not so far off, the day you'll be preparing for your first donations. You need to remember that. If you're to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, everyone of you'". (Ch.7, p.79-80)

Analysis Chapter 7 

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.”

Analysis Chapter 7  

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. 

Analysis Chapter 7

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 live their ordinary lives by just not thinking about that aspect of their future. 

Analysis Chapter 7 

The students learn that they are: 

clones, 

and then just go on living.

Analysis Chapter 7 

Tommy shows a large amount of self-knowledge, and a great deal of awareness 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 doubts donating their organs, as efficiently and humanely as possible. 

Analysis Chapter 8 

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 bad-tempered as he was when he was throwing temper tantrums.

Analysis Chapter 8

Kathy resolved that she herself would begin having sex, and picked a boy, Harry, 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 wondered whether Hailsham students at the time weren’t exaggerating the nature of their sex lives to seem “cool.”

Like donations, sex also differentiates the students, who cannot bear children, from people in the outside world. Miss Emily reinforces the association between donations and sex in her lectures, which often combine the two subjects. But her frankness about sex contrasts with the guardians’ continued delicateness on the subject of donations. The students mirror this, openly discussing sex and relationships while generally avoiding talk of the donations that will shape their adult lives. 

Think about this...

What about this focus on creativity? 

"Then she says: "Listen, Tommy, your art, it is important. And not just because it's evidence. But for your own sake. You'll get a lot from it, just for yourself.'"

"'Hold on, what did she mean, "evidence"?'" (Ch.9, p.106).

"'Tommy, I made a mistake, when I said what I did to you. And I should have put you right about it long before now.'  Then she's saying I should forget everything she told me before. That she's done me a big disservice telling me not to worry about being creative. That the other guardians had been right all along, and there was no excuse for my art being so rubbish...'" (Ch.9, p.105)

Never Let Me Go

Read Chapters 11-14 for our next meeting