It has been a long time since my first reading experience of Never Let Me Go (for which I am going to use the contracted form of NLG from now on). The novel has stayed with me since then, but I have not yet ventured to write my thoughts on it because it is hard for me to write about an important book as this in the same casual way as I have done about other works of fiction. Havin said that, I would like to have a very casual discussion on NLG because…well, for no reason but my precarious mood. Let us talk about the book on the assumption that you have already read it because going deep into it without giving the spoilers is rather difficult. (Shame on me for calling my own discussion ‘deep’. Do not worry, it is not deep at all.) If you have not, please do stop reading my boring article this instant, go to the local library, borrow the book and read it (and, hopefully, come back here and share your thoughts). In this article, I would like to pose two questions. One is the question of whether the narrator Kathy is satisfied with her life in the end. The other is that of whether the novel itself is a happy one or a tragic one. Simple as that.
To give you a bit of the synopsis, NLG is set in England in around the 1990s and the main characters are Kathy, who is also the narrator, Ruth and Tommy. All of them are clones raised cut off from the outside world at a boarding school called Hailsham to become organ donors and, going through several donations, die in the end.
So where shall we start? I think it is always best to simply begin with the things that interest us most. What I find particularly interesting about it is the way the people from the outside world - including the reader - see the clones. It seems that ‘normal’ people like us are expected to view them, with some degree of pity, as helpless poor creatures. Why is that? Well, because they are destined to die at a very young age, and from the very outset, their purpose of life is fixed, which is the one and only task of giving away their organs. Surely, they must be very unhappy, right?
What lies behind this idea is that we look at them as though the definition of happiness is a fixed thing. Conversely, this implies the assumption that they would be happy if they were normal like us instead of being clones. This assumption negates the possibility of clones having happy lives since happiness in this context is already set, that is, being ‘normal’. Let us call this fixed definition of happiness ‘imagined happiness’, as it is not the happiness they actually experience but the one we/they ‘imagine’ they would get if they did or had certain things.
Let me try to clarify this ‘imagined happiness’ thing a bit. Are you familiar with that moment when you browse your Instagram feed, look at those fabulous pictures of celebrities imagining, ‘If I had a life like theirs, my life would be perfect’? That can be one example of imagined happiness in our everyday life. In NLG, there is the scene where Ruth dreams of working in a nice office like the one she sees in a magazine. She does not know the actual experience of working as an office worker, but she imagines that it would provide her with a happy life, which I think is another instance of imagined happiness. I am afraid I am still confused as to the exact difference between imagined happiness (a thing you wish for to happen) and a dream/an ambition/a purpose (also a thing you wish for to happen). One thing I am sure of is that the latter is based on your own real experience/knowledge and has more tangible reasons for the desire (eg. I want to work in that office because it is near where I am living and also I know the job bears excellent job security.), whereas imagined happiness tends to be unrealistic and be based on others’ experience. In that case, the person is likely to somehow think that fulfilling that desire secures you happiness. (eg. If I were not a clone, blah blah blah.)
What causes a person to desire imagined happiness? I think it happens when a person starts to compare their situation to others’, or to be more precise, when the involvement of otherness begins. This is unavoidable in life, of course. The clones cannot just spend their entire lifetime shut up in their comfort zone. When exposed to others, it is inevitable for you to compare yourself with them, almost like a passage of rite. As a result, you are more likely to feel a kind of dissatisfaction with what you are or what you have. That is just how life is. This feeling of dissatisfaction can be a great drive for achieving goals, but there is also a risk of confusing what you want with what others have. In a nutshell, imagined happiness is just another ‘copy’ of someone else’s happiness.
In light of this, let us go back to our initial questions. First, is Kathy satisfied with her life in the end? Well, I would say yes. Let me explain why. First, I must admit that the question itself feels a bit pointless as one’s life contains both satisfied and dissatisfied moments; It is not just one thing. I am also aware that the word ‘happiness’ itself is too vague to use in an argument, but I do not believe that she reflects on her thirty-ish years of life with dissatisfaction. Unlike Ruth, Kathy does not choose to let her imagined happiness (whatever that is) take over her life. (I am not judging Ruth here.) What she does instead is to create her own personal definition of happiness. To her, happiness means the time and the place she spent with her friends because it is a great part of her identity, that is, a thing that justifies her existence for being what she is. Clones in general have little to differentiate themselves from others with. They have no family nor any career of their choice (just ‘carers’ or ‘donors’) etc. So, Kathy finds consolation in Hailsham. She does not assert it, but there is a scene where she clearly sees how much Hailsham matters to her, when she talks about the rumour of its closing with Laura. After that scene, she makes the decision to go back to the memory of the place in the end and become a carer especially for those from Hailsham.
This leads us back to the motif of copying and originality in NLG. It is quite clear that Hilsham holds a special place in Kathy’s heart. By giving her own answer to the question of what happiness is and living by it, instead of trying to hold onto imagined happiness that never comes true, she learns to be content with what she has got. In that sense, she succeeds in becoming original in its truest sense, as she does not desire a copy of someone else’s happiness.
Let us move on to the second question: Is NLG a positive novel? The story definitely has some very sad moments and the overall tone is pretty depressing because it deals with death. Yet, it does not necessarily present being a clone as a completely negative thing. Clones in this novel are representative of a minority of real-life society, and the story seems more about their accepting what they are rather than resisting it. To be more exact, they do not even ‘accept’ because they do not take their own existence for a negative thing that needs acceptance in the first place…if that makes any sense. They go on being what they are. That is all. I think that it is the way non-clone people like Miss Emily see them that creates this binary structure of clones being poor and non-clone being lucky, as said before, hence producing a fixed definition of happiness. This story deconstructs that structure by showing Kathy’s finding importance in her Hailsham memory and making her own definition of happiness. I think this idea is important in an age of diversity.
So my answer to the second question is, as you can probably tell by now, yes. I think NLG is a positive novel overall, at least based on what I made of it. The book shows us different kinds of happiness, blurring the apparently fixed definition of happiness.
However, I do not want to go as far as to suggest that anyone under any circumstances can lead a happy life. That is just sugarcoating the harsh reality of life. (Well, I might have given you a too much sugarcoated interpretation already!) I mean, if you look at the headlines of newspapers, those devastating things happening in the world at this very moment are almost hard to believe.
I am not sure if I should publish this article on my blog because I feel like my idea is a bit of a stretch and my argument has completely fallen apart. Oh well, I did try though. I hope that this article gives you, at least, a sense of what I felt.