Never Let Me Go Chapter 3 Commentary

How does Ishiguro create a sense of isolation and otherness in this passage?


*Madame clutches her briefcase to her chest, self-protective gesture – even before she sees the children, we sense that she is scared…also implies that she may need to guard the documents carefully. Multi-layered hints that Madame is not just a kind adult – there are unsettling elements to the way she is described
* In this scene, there is a strong sense of two groups – the children who have made a ‘scheme’ and a ‘plot’ versus Madame. The children assume that they are in control, as they are the ones who have carefully planned for this moment for so long, ‘on a signal from Ruth’, ‘the plan we’d come up with’. However, the shock of this episode, is that actually the children are the ones who are most deeply disturbed and scared by the encounter with Madame, not the other way around. There is a turning point, ‘the strange change that came over us’, when the children realise that Madame does not consider them to be like her, but rather reacts to them as though they are insects.

We see this when Madame  ‘just froze and waited’.  ‘She was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders.’ This introduces the idea for the first time, that the children are somehow considered to be inferior or at any rate to be a different kind of being (‘spiders’) to the teachers. This is intensely distressing for the students, ‘Even Ruth looked really shaken’. As readers, we feel shocked in our turn that Madame would treat the children like this, and we share their sense of bewilderment and fear. After the incident, the children have a real sense that they do not belong, that they are different, ‘We were a very different group from the one that had stood about excitedly, waiting for Madame to get out of her car’. With more information now about the world around them, they have grown up in a sense but it is a growing up into a much more sinister and frighteningly uncertain world.  ​


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