论文总字数：40550字

摘 要

《别让我走》是著名英国小说家石黑一雄在2005年出版的小说。这部小说以克隆人为描写的主要社会群体。整部小说以克隆人凯茜为叙述者，讲述了为器官捐献而存在的克隆人群体的生活。自出版以来，许多学者从文化、语言、伦理等角度来分析此小说。本文将从拟结合前人的研究内容，以创伤书写为出发点，对《别让我走》的克隆人个体、群体所遭受的个体创伤、集体创伤及文化创伤进行分析，以尝试丰富国内对石黑一雄作品的研究。

论文第一章从个人创伤层面出发，选取了凯茜、露丝以及汤姆三个主要人物，分别探讨他们所遭受的创伤。凯茜因为相继失去朋友而孤独；露丝有强烈的自尊心，但她对美好生活的渴望却最终破灭；汤米在黑尔舍姆被孤立和嘲笑。第二章从集体创伤层面出发，指出克隆人群体的命运在出生前就被决定，克隆人被创造出来的目的仅仅是为了器官移植，拯救正常人的生命，而大部分克隆人在进行几次捐献之后都会死亡。他们过着单调的生活，一生所经历的一切都安排好了。第三章从文化创伤层面出发。人类收集克隆人的画作因为他们怀疑克隆人没有灵魂。同时，克隆人被剥夺了为人父母的权利，而他们之前的爱情也没有想象中的牢固。可以说创伤是石黑一雄作品的永恒主题，其笔下的每一个主人公都遭受这样那样的创伤，而这种创伤影响了他们的一生。

关键词：石黑一雄；《别让我走》；创伤；克隆人

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Abstract ii

摘 要 iii

Introduction 1

An Brief Introduction of Kazuo Ishiguro and His Novel Never Let Me Go 1

Literature Review 2

Contemporary Trauma Theory 2

Thesis Structure 3

Chapter One: Personal Trauma in Finding Oneself 5

1.1 Anxious and helpless Kathy 5

1.2 Ruth: the Failure of Finding Her Possible 7

1.3 The Isolated Tom 8

Chapter Two: Collective Trauma in the Management System 10

2.1 The Decided Life and Death: Organ Donation 10

2.2 Obedience: Monotonous Life 11

Chapter Three: Cultural Trauma in the Process of Getting Along with the Normal Human Beings 14

3.1 The Existence of Soul 14

3.2 The Hollow Emotion 15

Conclusion 18

Works Cited 20

Introduction

An Brief Introduction of Kazuo Ishiguro and His Novel Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro is a well-known contemporary English novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Japan but moved to England when he was still a child. So far, he has won several influential prizes and nominations including Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, Booker Prize. In 2005, his novel Never Let Me Go was published. Some scholars and experts have done research on this novel in the past 11 years at home and abroad.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s science fiction novel Never Let Me Go was published in 2005. With this novel, Kazuo Ishiguro was the nominee of the Booker Prize, Arther C. Clarke Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. There is no doubt that Never Let Me Go is a well-written novel which won a number of awards. In 2010, a film adaptation was released.

Kathy H is the narrator of Never Let Me Go. She has been a carer of the donors for a long time and tells us what she has experienced and seen during her life time. In fact, Kathy and her friend, such as Tommy and Ruth, are the clones. They are raised up in a boarding school called Hailsham. The teachers, or “guardians” impart knowledge about geography, poetry and painting to them. The clones are asked to take good care of their health but they are unaware of the outside world. Within the campus, there are Exchanges and Sale, the students are able to get other students’ works or something special. They live like the normal human beings in Hailsham , only without the capability of getting out of the place.

When the students become adolescents, they are sent to Cottages or other places. Gradually, they begin to realize that the only purpose of creating them is to provide organs to others. They have to receive training at first and become a carer for donors for a period of time. However, ultimately, they need to start donations, which gradually takes away their life.

Some clones assume they can live a normal life or just postpone donations, while it turns out to be impossible. The clones’ destiny is doomed and what they can do is to face the reality.

Literature Review

As a British novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro made a name for himself in the 1980s. Each one of his novels has become classic that it attracts much attention. He is widely regarded as an international writer. He focuses on human’s inner world instead of the outside world. Domestic researches about Kazuo Ishiguro and his works start from 1990s, marked by the article written by Mu Zi and published in Foreign Literature. In the past twenty years, quite a number of domestic researches can be available. While compared with foreign research, the domestic research starts later and few achievements can be obtained. When it comes to Never Let Me Go, there are few research papers on  China National Knowledge Infrastructure and most of them explore the main characters or the mode of management of Hailsham. For example, Fang, Xingfu states that language, logic and social taboo make the clones lose some feelings, thoughts and experience. Thus social unconsciousness develops among the clones. (109)

Foreign researches on Kazuo Ishiguro and his novels began almost 40 years ago. Achievements of the research include comments, monographs, papers and journals, the latter two making up for the majority of them. Foreign researches are more systematic and diversified than domestic researches.

Contemporary Trauma Theory

The word “trauma” originates from the Greek word, which means the physical injury made by the external force. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association includes the term “post-traumatic stress order” in the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. After that, trauma became popular in the field of western public politics, humanistic care and historical and cultural cognition. The contemporary core connotation indicates that trauma is the people’s psychological reaction to natural disaster, war, genocide, sexual abuse or other atrocities. Trauma can influence people’s illusion, dream, thought and behavior and make them forgetful, frightened, depressed or hysteric.

In the contemporary world, miserable experiences and torturous circumstances which render people overwhelming and bring them sorrow can be defined as “trauma” . From time to time, conditions that are beyond the scope of normal human beings’ life can also lead to the occurrence of trauma. For particular social groups, they experience trauma often enough. Essentially, trauma is intrusive, persistent and mandatory. It can be divided into following categories: personal trauma and collective trauma; family trauma and political terror trauma; trauma of industrial accidents and trauma of war; trauma to children and adults; intergenerational historical trauma, racial wounds and trauma of sexual violence; direct trauma and indirect trauma; perpetrators’ trauma and victims’ trauma.

Cathy Caruth was described by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. as one of the most innovative scholars on what we call trauma. According to Cathy, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenonmena. (11) “Trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival.” ( Cathy 58)

Thesis Structure

This thesis is divided into five parts. The introduction introduces Kazuo Ishiguro and his novel Never Let Me Go. At the same time, research status at home and abroad about Never Let Me Go and trauma theory are introduced in this part. Chapter one will discuss the trauma of the main characters—Kathy, Tommy and Ruth individually. Kathy, as the narrator of the novel, experiences psychological trauma because of her own identity and the loss of her friends. Tommy and Ruth’ s trauma results from their own special experience and characteristics. Chapter two will discuss the collective trauma of the clones, who are first raised up in Hailsham and then sent to Cottages and other two places. Their fates are doomed and their life is monotonous. Cultural trauma will be discussed in chapter three and the issue of whether the clones have the soul and emotion will be deeply probed into here. The conclusion summarizes the contents of the three chapters and emphasizes the importance of the theme of trauma in Never Let Me Go.

Chapter One: Personal Trauma in Finding Oneself

1.1 Anxious and helpless Kathy

Kathy H. is the narrator of the novel and the representative of the clones. “Kathy’s narrative is part memoir and part rights claim, demonstrating the ability of autobiographical narrative to communicate stories of exploitation and injustice by giving a voice to marginalized social groups struggling on the fringes of supposedly democratic societies.” (Levy 1)Like others, Kathy H. lives in Hailsham in her childhood and then is sent to the Cottages, but she has some differences. Firstly, when the students are still in the boarding school and the majority of them tease and isolate Tommy, Kathy becomes Tommy’s friend and receives Tommy’s respect. They share secrets and ideas about the surroundings. When Tommy tells Kathy what happenes between him and the guardian, Kathy often listens patiently and gives him sincere suggestions. She is also the mediator between Ruth and Tommy. For instance, Ruth turns to Kathy for help to get back together with Tommy. Ruth firmly holds the view that Kathy Secondly, Kathy reads the porn mag in the boiler in order to find her “possible”. However, after they fails to find Ruth’s “possible” in the Norfolk—the lost corner of the England, Kathy is disappointed. Thirdly, she has been a carer for almost 12 years, longer than most of the clones.

Kathy is anxious about her identity and fate all the time just like others in spite of these differences. To prove whether Madame was afraid of them, Kathy joins others to swarm out all around her, all and at once. (Ishiguro 34) Madame totally freaks out by the clones’ sudden behavior, which can be told from her facial expression. Their action proves Ruth’s opinion that they are just like monsters in the eyes of Madame. It means that the clones can not be accepted by the human society. Kathy is really shaken when she knows normal human beings’ thoughts about them. What’s more, she worries about donation and attempts to defer it by finding Madame with Tommy and proving they are truly in love with each other, although it proves to be unsuccessful and useless.

Kathy is also helpless. The reason is that she and Tommy once tries to defer their donations after Ruth’s death by proving the two of them fall in love with each other but it fails at last because the theory of being able to defer the donation is always a rumor. There is no doubt that Ruth and Tommy are important to Kathy. Therefore, after they “complete” successively, Kathy is lonely. At the beginning of the novel, Kathy argues that a carer should have the right to choose the donor, she claimes that carers aren’t machines. Nearly all the carers, including Kathy, make every effort to take good care of the organ donors while they are burdened with endless work. Therefore, it may be lucky for Kathy to be a carer instead of a donor, but the job is tiring for her and even worse when she is alone. From time to time, she misses the time spent in Hailsham. When she is driving on the road in her free time or commutes between hospitals, the passing things, such as a farm house, a tree, a playground, may remind her of Hailsham. She frequently mistakes the passing places for Hailsham but after she sobers up completely, she realizes that it is impossible and what she sees is fantasy. What she can only do is to keep driving and to shift her attention to other things.

Although Hailsham has been torn down, it still occupies a significant position in Kathy’s heart. However, she once tries to leave Hailsham behind. She has kept attempting to forget the time she spent in Hailsham for several years. The reason is that looking back to the past will only bring her sorrow, especially after losing her friends. Those memorable days have gone but finally, she stops resisting. Memories can not be erased. Cathy tells us that it is only by recognizing traumatic experience as a paradoxical relation between destructiveness and survival that we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophic experience.(5) Life in Hailsham is not too bad for Kathy, but thinking about it will undoubtedly remind her of her dead friends and the time they spent together. There life and friendship originates from Hailsham. Kathy is left alone so that she wants to grasp the memory.

She not only has the power to move on, but also narrates she and other clones’ experience in detail. Since Kathy is such a heroic character, there is no doubt that readers can see the light in her. Kathy is deprived of a lot of rights but she never lose the confidence in life. Kathy, as a clone, dwarfs the normal human beings.

1.2 Ruth: the Failure of Finding Her Possible

In this novel, Ruth is quite a special character. When she and other students are still in Hailsham, she is eager to be different from others. She is the leader of the secret guard which is invented to protect Miss Geraldine who is a popular and respected guardian. For the purpose of proving that she has a special place in Miss Geraldine’s heart, Ruth implies to other students that her beautiful pencil case is given by Miss Geraldine. Ruth has high self-esteem so that she is afraid when Kathy exposes her lies. Although she doesn’t have a horse at all, she invites Kathy to play with her with imaginary horses. She also says that she gives Kathy the privilege to ride on her favorite horse. In the Cottages, unlike Kathy, Ruth merges into the environment and quickly gets along with “the veterans”—the students who are already there. She imitates their behavior and deliberately lets others know that Tommy and she is a couple. On the way to Norfolk with Tommy, Kathy and another two veterans—Chrissie and Rodney, Ruth keeps talking with the later two and decides to pay a visit to Martin after she fails to find her “possible”.

Ruth is so eye-catching that the trauma she suffers can not be ignored. Compared with Kathy, Ruth has a desire to live a normal or even decent life. She wants to work in an office. Therefore, the fact that her possible is not the woman who works in the office in Norfolk makes her deeply hurt although she pretends not to be so because all of them believe that the normal human beings from whom they are copied can reflect the nature of themselves. The clones’ life in the future is very likely to be similar to that of their possibles. Therefore, the incident shatters Ruth’s hope. She even says: “We all know it. We’ re modeled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from.” (Ishiguro 166) The experience makes Ruth embarrassed and disappointed so that all of them don’t talk about it after they went back to the Cottages.

Donation brings physical trauma to her and eventually leads to her death and at the same time, Ruth begins to change. She used to be a tough girl both physically and mentally while she is unhealthy and fragile as a donor. In the novel, Ishiguro describes her in detail to reflect her fragility when she has to across a barbed wire fence in order to see the boat:

When Ruth saw it, she came to an abrupt halt.

“Oh no,” she said, anxiously. Then she turned to me: “You didn’t say anything about this. You didn’t say we had to get past barbed wire!”

“It’s not going to be difficult,” I said. “We can go under it. We just to have to hold it for each other.”(Ishiguro 222)

Although Kathy gives Ruth encouragement, Ruth is still quite afraid of the fence and rejects to move at all. Ruth’s shoulders keeps rising and falling accompanied by shortness of breath. For the first time, Kathy and Tommy seem to be conscious of Ruth’s weakness and they help her to across the fence. On the way back to hospital, Ruth even admits that Kathy and Tommy should be a couple and asks Kathy to forgive her by keeping them apart. It is Ruth that gives Tommy and Kathy the clue to find Madame.

1.3 The Isolated Tom

In Hailsham, there is once a period of time when Tom is isolated by other boys. Even the girls laugh at Tommy. Laura, one of the female clones, is always mimicking Tommy’ s expression and behavior even if Tommy doesn’t do anything odd. Her only purpose is to make others laugh. The students takes delight in Tommy’ s pain. The isolation results from a picture painted by Tom. His painting is so childish that Tommy has been looked down by other clones since then.

The infliction Tommy suffers from brings out his rage and psychological trauma. Ishiguro gives detailed description about it:

Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after them—it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.(9)

The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post.( Ishiguro 9-10)

From the above words, readers can figure out that the bully is so serious that Tommy is badly hurt. What’s worse, some male clones frequently play hateful tricks on Tommy in order to irritate him. Their plots usually prevail and the guardians have no choice but to blame Tommy. Although Tommy learns to control his temper after a period of time no matter how hard other boys try to irritate him, the effect of the traumatic events is everlasting. Sometimes, it is really difficult for him to understand others’ remarks and ideas. Ruth tells Chrissie that even though Tom is “left out of everything”(Ishiguro 155) and people are always laughing at him therefore he isn’t like a real Hailsham student. Although Tommy has learned to control his temper and doesn’t get angry for a long time, the look that appears in his eyes may sometimes frightens Ruth. At that instant, it seems that the irritable Tommy comes back. Luckily, the condition only lasts a short time. “Then the look faded, he turned to the sky outside and let out a heavy breath.”(Ishiguro 155)

Deep down in Tommy’ s heart, the incidents happened in the past can not be easily be forgotten and forgiven. Ruth’s mention of his past miserable experience makes him painful and he needs to make great efforts to repress his anger and to disguise his emotion.

During the time spent in the Cottages, Tommy develops the habit of drawing animals. The tiny details of these animals are vividly and Tommy imagined that their appearance are made of mental or rubber. The characteristics of his painting can be seen as the reflection of his inner world as well as the differences between him and other clones.

Chapter Two: Collective Trauma in the Management System

The clones, as a collective live under a management system created by the normal human beings. Their life and death are decided because of organ donation. In addition, they cannot escape from the routine of studying in Hailsham, being sent to some places and working and dying in hospitals and centers.

2.1 The Decided Life and Death: Organ Donation

Collective trauma can be defined as a traumatic psychological effect shared by a group of people. Collecive trauma can brings out people’s sentiment, including frustation, sadness, anger. The novel Never Let Me Go imagines a fictional society where clone people are raised up in a boarding school—Hailsham, which is secluded from the outside world. They are educated and taken care of just for the benefit of the normal human beings. Organ donation is the purpose of their existence. To keep healthy, the students in Hailsham have some form of medical examination every week. What’s more, the guardians often warn the students of keeping an eye on their bodies. Peter J. dreams about being an actor in the United States and Ruth once wishes to be a woman working in an well-decorated office. However, Miss Lucy tells them the truth. All of the clones are unlikely to have decent lives. They even don’t have the chance to work in supermarkets. Before the clones enter middle age, organ donation will become the most significant part of their life. The normal human beings need the vital organs of the clones to prolong their own life. That’s the only purpose that the clones are brought to the world in the first place. Miss Lucy even draws a line between herself who is the representative of the normal human beings and the clones relentlessly. Such a impassable gulf will exist forever.

There was no doubt that the students are shocked at Miss Lucy’s remarks. It is the first time that the students clearly get to know what their future will be like.The intimate relationship between the guardians and students is also broken. After they graduat from Hailsham, the students are sent to three places to continue their lives. One of the places is the Cottages where Kathy, Tommy, Ruth and some other students stay, but it does not change anything. Sooner or later, they have to begin to be a carer and finally, be a donor. How long they can live all depended on themselves. Ruth and Tommy die after the second and the fourth donation separately. They are just the miniature of the clones.

In the novel, Kazuo Ishiguro only gives a detailed description about the condition before Ruth’s death:

She was in a room by herself, and it looked like they’d done everything they could for her.

It was like she was willing her eyes to see right inside herself, so she could patrol and marshal all the better the separate areas of pain in her body—the way, maybe, an anxious carer might rush between three or four ailing donors in different parts of the country. She was, strictly speaking, still conscious, but she wasn’t accessible to me as I stood there beside her metal bed. All the same, I pulled up a chair and sat with her hand in both of mine, squeezing whenever another flood pain made her twist away from me. (235-236)

As one of Ruth’s friends, Kathy accompanies her till her death. Ruth’s death is undoubtedly anguished and unavoidable. Her body is incomplete since several organs has been taken away by the normal human beings to save their lives. Organ donation brings much pain to the clones and makes them suffer. Clone people are just like animals whose lives are under the control of human beings. Their death is unavoidable.

2.2 Obedience: Monotonous Life

Some scholars hold an view that the clones in the novel have no spirit of resistance. They accept the arrangements made for them instead of fighting against the arrangements most of the time. As mentioned above, several clones want to live a decent life instead of being an organ donor, but they have no human right. Titus Levy believes that Kathy’s voice does, in some ways, stand in for the clone community as a whole. Like all the other clones, she must eventually sacrifice the personal freedoms she has enjoyed to the demands of the society. (3) There is a contradiction between the freedom of the clones and the need of human society. The clones are at a more disadavantaged position than the normal human beings so that the clones have to live in the shadow. To some extent, they are reluctant to become the victims. Living just to fulfill the expectations of others is meaningless. That’s the reason why there is a fantastic theory that as long as a couple can prove that they truly love each other, they can put off the donation.

Although the students have classes and some extra-curriculum activities in Hailsham, such as Exchanges and Sale, the lives of the students can be said to be monotonous. Hailsham is a closed environment and the students nearly have no chance to communicate with people from other places. Madame, who comes to Hailsham to collect the best works of the students, is afraid of them. If the students want to get some stuffs from outside, they have to wait for the Sale, yet there is nothing special on it.

Compared with time spent in Hailsham, the time spent in Cottages is even more tiring and boring. Only eight students get there and living condition is much worse than that of Hailsham. “The Cottages were the remains of a farm that had gone out of business years before. There was an old farmhouse, and around it, barns, outhouses, stables all converted for us to live in.” (Ishiguro 116) The most serious problem is the heating equipment. The students firstly cannot stand the cold in winter. They once asks Keffer to provide them with more logs but it doesn’t work at all. There is no way for them to warm themselves. With the passage of time, the clones gradually get used to the bad living environment.

The students are exited about life in Cottages despite the disadvantages. They have the freedom to go outside the Cottages but they seldom do so. Some incidents chang the relationship between Ruth, Tommy and Kathy. Sooner after, more and more people in Cottages become a carer. Kathy leaves first and starts the training of being a carer.

Each of the clones has almost the same experience. As a carer, they are exhausted by attending others and witnessing death. As a donor, they’re faced with organ donation, which depletes them at last.

Chapter Three: Cultural Trauma in the Process of Getting Along with the Normal Human Beings

“Cultural trauma occurs when individual and groups feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their consciousness, will mark their memories forever, and will change their future in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” (Alexander 1) The clones should be treated as a group. Each individual has the similar experience. The attitude and opinion of normal human beings take towards them decide their fate. In the end of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro don’t show the how the clones’ future life will be like but it can be inferred that their destiny will remian unchangeable within the next serveral decades. The impact of cultural trauma is persistant.

3.1 The Existence of Soul

The Gallery is mentioned several times throughout the novel. When Kathy is only five or six years old, she tells about the Gallery with Amanda C. in Hailsham. They keep searching for the reality about the Gallery since Madame comes to take the best paintings of the students away every once in a while. In the later part of the novel, with the help of Ruth, Kathy and Tommy successfully find Madame for the sake of postponing the donation. The truth is the Gallery does not exist at all. The guardian Miss Emily takes control of the Hailsham and collects students’ works. The purpose is to prove that the clones have souls as the normal human beings. It reveals that a cognitive gap exists between the normal human beings and the clones. The normal human beings begin to be concerned about the clones. They start to take the existence and growth of the clones into consideration. Nevertheless, what has been done can not be reversed. At the beginning, the normal human beings want to use the clones to cure the serious disease, such as cancer. It is the clones that give the human society great hope. While, on the other hand, like Miss Emily says to Tommy and Kathy:

The world didn’t want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked. They didn’t want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows. Back in the shadows where you’d been before the likes of Marie-Claude and myself ever came along.(Ishiguro 264-265)

What Miss Emily indicats is that the normal human beings just want take advantage of the clones instead of creating some creatures smarter than them. The normal human beings face the paradoxical conditions. Souls can be seen as the key features of normal human beings. Therefore, the clones could not have souls. They are just tools in the eyes of the normal human beings. That Hailsham is torn down means that the normal human beings are unconcerned about the spiritual world of the clones at all. This part of the novel is the climax. The readers can find the solution to the mystery about those clones. The reality is a disappointment not only to Kathy and Tommy, but also to the clones as the whole. For a long time, the particular illusion supports them to live and gives them hope but all of a sudden, those clones become disillusioned.

What is also worth mentioning is that the clones in Never Let Me Go don’t have a normal family name. Letters of an alphabet are used to distinguish between one and another, such as Kathy H, Jenny B and Reggie D. To some degree, the difference also represents people’s disregard and indifference for the clones. This minor differentia actually reflects a substantial disparity between the clones and the normal human beings. That’s also the reason why those normal human beings don’t think the clones have souls.

3.2 The Hollow Emotion

Love and friendship is the most important emotion to the clones. They don’t have parents and they can’t have children, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the desire to have a baby. When Kathy first hears the song Never Let Me Go, she imagines herself as a mother who loses her baby. The expression on her face and her behavior are so touching that Madame is shocked. Unfortunately, she loses the tape. When Ruth, Tommy, Kathy and other two clones try to find Ruth’s possible in Norfolk, Tommy helps Kathy to find the tape again, The tape is one of the most important things to Kathy. Some of them fall in love with each other, such as Ruth and Tommy, Chrissie and Rodney. However, to some extent, their love is not as firm as they think. Ruth admits that she has sex with other boys from time to time. As for Kathy, who never form a couple with some one else, having sex with other boys becomes the regular pattern. Although Kathy and Tommy get together after Ruth’s death, it is too late. Losing her friends and being a carer makes Kathy lonely. She used to grew up with scores of people who are acquaintances or even friends of her. All of sudden, she becomes a carer. In order to take carer of the patients, she can only change the workplace, driving from center to center, hospital to hospital. Kathy even doesn’t have a fixed residence. It seems that she is always on the way. Sleeping in overnights becomes the routine of her life. She is surrounded by a feeling of solitude. As the normal human beings, the clones have the desire to share sadness, worries and happiness with others. That’s the reason why all creatures need friends and families. Running into a familiar student or a donor is supposed to be a lucky thing while Kathy is too exhausted to talk to them. What’s more, she is busy with her job and doesn’t have much time. “Soon enough, the long hours, the travelling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.”(Ishiguro 208)

In fact, feeling lonely is the common experience of all the clones. Before being a donor, they all need to receive the training of a carer and be a carer for a period of time. What they’re faced with everyday are the exhausting job. No acquanitances can be attained. Kathy’s narration represents the whole group’s thoughts and mentality. What’s more, no matter how hard they try to stay with their lover, they will be forced to separate from each other.

The clones are the products of artificial intelligence. The normal human beings create them but they don’t take responsibility for the clones. They don’t realize that the clones, just as other creatures, have spiritual and emotional needs. The hollow emotion of the clones are caused not only by their nature, but also by the normal human beings. The culture trauma they suffer causes them pain and will leave an indeliable mark in their history.

Conclusion

Never Let Me Go covers and explores a number of themes. For example, human rights, cloning and heterosexuality can be deeply reflected in this novel. “It poses an ethical question about the modern technique of cloning.” (Deyan 2508) As Titus Levy mentioned in his article:

The novel also reckons with trauma narrative, interrogating the ways people express themselves in the wake of atrocity, and how others respond to those aestheticizations of human suffering with varying degrees of empathy, indifference, and perversion. Never Let Me Go examines the ways in which atrocity can become normalized, hidden in the routines of daily life. (2)

The clones are created and taken advantage of by human beings. Hailsham tries to make the students knowledgeable, especially in the aspect of art and poetry. It’s the place where the clones live like normal human beings, while the fate of the clones can not be changed. Hailsham is ultimately torn down instead of being developed and advocated since the normal human beings don’t want to be reminded of the existence of the clones. It means that the life of the clones will become harder and harder in the future. The trauma that the clones have is even more serious than that of the normal human beings. The injustice treatment, the denial and the ignorance from the outside world results in their pain and suffering.

In the novel, the collective trauma is mainly reflected in the clones’ destiny. Their destiny is decided even before they are born. In their life, they cannot avoid and escape organ donation. From the individual level, there are some differences among clones. Kathy seems to be the luckiest one because she lives longer than others. However, witnessing her friends’ deaths and being alone result in her tragedy. Being a carer is also a wearing occupation. As for Ruth, her vanity and aggressive personality bring her pressure. Tommy suffers a lot early in Hailsham. He keeps being laughed at and bullied for a period of time. Even after he has grown up, his paintings and ideas can not be understood by most of the clones. Others even use this experience to explain his quirkiness and bluntness. Last but not least, culture trauma that they suffer is everlasting. People hold the view that the clones don’t have souls. What’s more, their emotion is hollow. Kathy and Tommy are bound to be together, but they become a couple only after Ruth’s death. The clones also don’t have the right to be parents.

Kazuo Ishiguro creates an imaginary world for the clones. In some aspects, their life is similar to normal human beings’, while the difference is that the clones are treated just like tools. Science, technology and human society should take responsibility for the sufferings of the clones.

Works Cited

Alexander Jeffery C. , Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004

Berger, J. “Trauma and literary theory.” Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 569-582.

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