Model Answers Never Let Me Go

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Commentary: Blown by the wind passage

How does Ishiguro present mood and atmosphere here?

The atmosphere of this scene is tense and emotional and Tommy gives vent to his emotions for the final time. Ishiguro uses darkness at the beginning of the extract to give an appropriately sinister and bleak backdrop to Tommy’s pain, ‘disappeared into blackness’. Darkness is often symbolic of death and in a way this entire episode could be seen as Tommy’s final railing against the brutal reality that he, Kathy and Ruth are going to die.

Ishiguro uses the hesitant and unreliable narration of Kathy in this extract to emphasise how significant this moment is for her and for Tommy. Kathy seems to want to imply throughout that it is Tommy whose emotions are out of control and that it is Tommy who is panicking, and that she is prevented from being there with him. However, the reader increasingly understands that there is very little difference between Tommy’s position and Kathy’s – and her rush to get to him and hold him ‘for ages, not saying anything’ creates a moment of great sadness and fragility. Images of darkness and blackness return and are combined with references to mud and ferocious wind. These are all powerful metaphors for the forces that are closing in on the clones in the novel – in a sense they are being treated as mud by their society, they are being propelled by forces beyond their control and the darkness of death will soon overcome them entirely. Kathy states that they hold on to each other ‘because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night’. This highlights how their love for each other – both romantic, sexual and the love of friendship – has been able to shield them from brutal realities up to this point in the novel. The long sentence creates a sense of breathlessness and mirrors the urgency of their longings to stay together and to someone protect each other. Fences are also used in this scene as they are elsewhere in the novel to reinforce the strong sense that there are unsurmountable barriers between the characters and their deepest longings.

This moment also has strong echoes of Tommy’s first temper tantrum in Chapter 1 – the strong emotions, screaming and mud are all here. This heightens the sense of pathos even more, as we look back on the clones’ story and can see that it has always been a sad one, and that their struggling against their fate or hoping things might change is futile. Kathy remains matter of fact ‘You stink of cow poo’, but overall the atmosphere is one of solemnity and fear as we recognise that death is inevitable for both Tommy and Kathy.  (450 words)

How is friendship presented in Never Let Me Go?

Ishiguro unsettles our expectations in Never Let Me Go from the very beginning as the title implies that the novel will be a love story: in fact, as a bildungsroman Never Let Me Go is concerned with growing up and friendship, particularly the way that friendship changes as people grow up. Ishiguro himself has commented that his main concern in Never Let Me Go was to explore how people deal with the knowledge that they are going to die, and the main way he does this is to explore how Kathy, Tommy and Ruth’s friendship is affected by their impending deaths. 

Ishiguro presents the friendship in a multi-layered and deeply moving way through using the first person narrative structure, dramatic irony and through the use of time in the novel. Kathy opens the novel ‘My name is Kathy H’, when she is on the cusp of dying. The entire narration of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth’s friendship is therefore overshadowed by the idea of the clones’ lives running out. Because of the sophisticated use of the dystopian setting and time in the novel, the reader only becomes aware of this gradually. This is very effective because the sense of overwhelming sadness that no matter how much Kathy, Tommy and Ruth care for one another they cannot be together is understated but present throughout.  This helps us to understand as readers that one of the only ways the clones can survive is through denial of their ultimate destiny. It also effectively puts us in the characters’ shoes as we hope against hope that there may be another way and we do not fully understand the horror of what awaits them at first. 

For example, Ishiguro uses the metaphor of the balloons in the novel to portray this sense of mourning over the death that is coming. Kathy sees a clown holding balloons that are presented in very human terms with ‘faces and ears’ and then these balloons are abruptly severed from each other with a pair of ‘shears’. The image of ‘shears’ is ominous and sinister as it makes the reader thinking of other types of cutting in Never Let Me Go. Not only are the three friends going to be cut off from each other permanently by their deaths, they are also going to have their organs cut out of them, a brutal yet unarticulated reality that casts its shadow over their lives and over the novel. Kathy herself sees the balloons as representing Hailsham and somehow cancelling all that was good about the relationships they enjoyed their ‘there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged together anymore’.

Because of their impending deaths, friendship in Never Let Me Go becomes more significant than it would normally be – the clones have no family and they have no ability to have their own children – therefore their friendships with each other are all that they have to cling onto, and as they approach their final days, all it would seem that Kathy has to think about. The love triangle therefore becomes more than a mere plot device to keep the reader’s interest – it seems to be Ishiguro’s way of emphasising the preciousness of relationships even if they are complicated and involve hurt and disappointment. Tommy and Kathy’s friendship for example is laced with unfulfilled longings for most of the novel and they are both continually aware that what they have is temporary. Ishiguro uses water imagery to portray the deep sadness and helplessness that Tommy and Kathy feel, ‘I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. …. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go…’.  This same sense of being forcibly separated from someone you love is also present in Kathy and Ruth’s relationship and at the end of the novel there is a strong sense of grief as Kathy is left alone, realising that she has lost all that is most precious to her, ‘I lost Tommy, and I lost Ruth, but I won’t lose my memories of them’.

In conclusion, Ishiguro forces us to see our own friendships in a completely fresh light through setting his bildungsroman in a disturbingly familiar and recognisable dystopian world. He crafts Kathy’s nostalgic narration effectively to convey the powerful emotions of longing and grief that the characters experience. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth experience these things in a heightened way, but in a way that seems immediate and identifiable to the reader. The gradual unveiling of the true destiny of the clones is the most effective way he does this. As Tommy says ‘We’ve loved each other all our lives, Kath – but we can’t stay together forever.’ (788)