Essay Sample on Death, Clones and Storytellers: A Tale of Kazuo Ishiguro's Tragic Novel

Introduction

Walter Benjamin sees, which can be concluded that every mortal faces the basic end of death. 'Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.' Kazuo Ishiguro's (2005) novel portrays death in all its aspects all through its pages. The tragic story penned down in this novel has been set in an alternative England dated to the late 1990s. This masterpiece centres on a trio of human clones who together have grown up and therefore hold a close bond when it comes to each other. On this bond formed, they face an unavoidable demise. Kazuo mirrors the human experience in an intensified manner. The characters portrayed in this novel, live alongside death's shadow. These characters spend their adolescent years working, first as 'carers,' supporting their kind who had commenced making donations of their organs and later they themselves did the donating.

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When we focus on the characters' become more aware of their unavoidable fate and how they strive to cope with anxiety, we are able to understand and meditate extensively on the topic of human mortality. This paper aims to establish awareness when it comes to death and hoe humans get to understand it. The story expresses how powerless art, love and other human endeavours is over death. Yet by foregrounding heroine Kathy's attachment to her past, it explores memory as a function of the mind that can help assuage the psychic trauma of mortality. The article investigates the link between mortality and memory perceivable in Kathy's autobiographical narrative. In writing this work, the author has, in his own dictum, aimed to examine 'the sadness of the human condition.'2 It is worth exploring the novel from the perspective of mortality because human finitude is a crucial factor that leads to the 'sadness' of the condition.

Kazuo Novel

Kazuo's novel begins with a description of the childhood lived by the characters. One of the main areas of her focus is the recollection Kathy has of her childhood. This involves how the students at Hailsham, a boarding school built to bring up young clones, are able to gain the knowledge of the fate that's coming to them.

The novel gives the reader the ability to internalize themselves regarding the background Kathy had with the use of phrases such as 'I don't know how it was where you were' and 'I don't know if you had "collections" where you were'. With the use of such a set-up the narrator doesn't need to narrate that it's the unique aspects found in their kind in which she speaks of. The idea is not easily established until the latter part of the novel where Kazuo fills the gaps of the happenings that took place earlier in the text. For instance, at the beginning pages of the novel, Kathy explains that students had to undergo some form of medical almost each week. The significance of this weekly medical cannot be known to the readers unless they get to more knowledge of the book in the later pages.

Kathy in her remembrances explains how she always had the knowledge about donations as early as when she was six or seven years; even though they were vague. Children were not so open about this subject and their guardians were not that different all the same as they would get awkward if the subject is brought up. Kathy goes on to explain an incident that happened when they were nine or ten that involved a student being punished by a teacher, Miss Lucy insisted that they must ensure they keep themselves healthy as they were special persons.

The information on mortality is handed down to students from an early age but is not openly discussed until they get to their teenage years. During sex lectures, the teachers utilize that opportunity to mix various matters within it. Kathy and Ruth remember an incident that took place when they were thirteen. Miss Emily who was their teacher at that time began speaking about sex before shifting to how impossible it is for them to make babies. That particular information at that time could not cause a stir among the students as their minds were still focused on the sex as that was their main curiosity. The knowledge with regards to who they really are is therefore availed to them in a controlled manner building in them the feeling goes knowing through an informal talk. Their attitude towards their future changed when they were thirteen and it was awkward for them as they began making jokes about it just the same way in which they joked about sex.

Kathy's memory of Hailsham includes two incidents that are pivotal to the characters' growth. To test the bold, perceptive Ruth's theory that Madame, who comes to Hailsham several times a year to collect the students' art works, always keeps a distance from them because she is scared of them, the students devise a ploy. They will move straight toward her as a group when she arrives. Madame's reaction proves that Ruth's hypothesis is correct. She is afraid of them, 'in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. The experience gives the eight-year-olds a 'cold moment', alerting them to the fact they are 'something troubling and strange' in the eyes of outsider. They face an even harsher moment of truth at the age of fifteen, a year before they leave Hailsham. Miss Lucy, who disagrees with the institution's policy of withholding information from the students, one day, explains their destined path to them. With the 'told and not told' turned into explicit knowledge, the students' perception about their future changes again:

It was after that day, jokes about donations faded away, and we [the students] started to think properly about things. If anything, the donations went back to being a subject to be avoided, but not in the way it had been when we were younger. This time round it wasn't awkward or embarrassing anymore; just sombre and serious. Hailsham provides the characters with a memorable childhood, a sense of prestige among clones from other institutions. The Hailsham experience is also a process through which the characters discover and learn to accept their identity. When they are small, they sense their destined role as a vague, childish embarrassment. In teenage years they adopt a joking, in other words, evasive attitude. When they grow into young adults, they understand it as something 'sombre and serious'.

Conclusion

With the memories of her past being held on, Kathy gets to accept the tragic fate that awaits her with tranquillity: It's like with my memories of Tommy and of Ruth ... I'll have Hailsham with me, safely in my head, and that'll be something no one can take away. Citing ideas such as Ricoeur's happy memory, Teo observes that Kathy's longing for her past and her wish to reunite with her deceased lover 'offer a strange sense of hope that brings a spiritual element to the novel's final moments'; the remainder of her life will be imbued with 'a profound happy memory and peace'.

References

Brombert, Victor. Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Cave, Stephen. Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.

Cohen, Gillian. Memory in the Real World. East Sussex, U.K.: Psychology Press, 1996. Currie, Mark. 'Controlling Time: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.' Sean Matthews and

Sebastian Groes eds. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. 91-103.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. 'Future Imperfect.' The Guardian 25 March 2006. 17 May 2016. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/25/featurereviews.guardianreview36

Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.