Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Hank Lamers

Mr. Neubeck

British Literature-7

11/15/16

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, Tommy lives his life in the most optimistic way a Hailsham student could, dealing with the challenges and burdens of his life as they are thrown at him, rather than living in the past or worrying about the future.

        Kathy, the novel’s main character and narrator, told the story from a worried or pessimistic point of view. She always wanted to gather information about her and her peers’ futures and why it was that way, and she consistently thought of the past times spent at Hailsham and mourned all of her lost friends, despite her knowledge for some time that what had happened was going to happen. However, one of her two best friends since growing up at Hailsham, Tommy does not seek all of this information, but rather, is told and accepts his fate. One day at Hailsham when all of the students are huddled under a canopy, forced in by the rain, Miss Lucy, Tommy’s favorite and most respected teacher tells the students: “You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided” (81). Tommy admires Miss Lucy and his talks with her and that is for this exact reason. She is straight to the point with the students, and he likes this honesty so that he can accept what will happen to him and live his life “in the now”. Later on in the same chapter, Tommy is teased for believing that his skin could unzip from a gash in his elbow, but he gets over it: “by then the days of his being teased were past and no one connected the joke with him anymore” (88). This leads to Kathy’s conclusion: “By that time in our lives, we no longer shrank from the subject of donations” (88). Tommy essentially accepted the fact that they were made to have their organs harvested by getting over the teasing quicker than normal. This brave and bold act made way for the rest of the students to follow his lead.

        With regards to looking back at their lives, Tommy takes a stance that the sooner a student could accept and cope with their fate, the easier their life will be. This position will make their memories easier to part with come the time of their last donation. Kathy clings to her career as a carer for longer than Tommy thinks she should have, which makes her more susceptible to these feelings of loneliness and sadness once all of her donors and friends have completed. Tommy attempts to help his then lover in this sense by asking her to find him a new carer before his final donation: “Kath, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. But I’ve been thinking it over a lot. Kath, I think I ought to get a different carer” (280). From his perspective, Tommy is doing Kathy a favor and helping her part with him and all of their memories from Hailsham together by exercising his freedom in choosing to end ties with her rather than being taken away from her by death, something out of their reach. Tommy’s “less is more” position on knowledge of their futures is evident when he and Kathy are discussing if they believe Ruth was better off not knowing the truth about deferrals and Hailsham closing and the reasons behind it. Tommy was asked “Are you glad Ruth completed before finding out everything we did in the end?” and eventually concluded “So yeah, in a way, I think it’s best the way it happened” (284). He thinks it is best that Ruth completed without knowing the painful truth that deferrals did not exist and that she kept Tommy and Kathy apart for so long. Tommy believes that it was better that she lived “in the moment” and died with a sense of hope and optimism for Kathy and Tommy, rather than knowing their fates.

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