Preview

Dystopian Society in Never Let Me Go

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1495 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Dystopian Society in Never Let Me Go
What if we found a cure for cancer? Diabetes? Even death? What would we willing to sacrifice for these medical miracles? Modern medicine has recently come made advances in the area of human cloning. Being able to successfully clone humans would solve many of our current medical problems and increase our life expectancy exponentially. Medically clones would be a solution to almost every problem we currently face. Morally however, the use of clones as medical supplies poses it’s own difficulties. Kazou Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go explores the ethical boundaries of creating an entire race of humans who’s only purpose it to supply organs. Beneath its straightforward plot line Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is an understated dystopia. The simplicity of the plot allows these themes to shine through with concise subtlety. The society in this novel is dystopian. This is illustrated by the deception of the students into thinking they live in a paradise because of isolation.
Never Let Me Go is narrated in the first person by Kathy H, a thirty one year old who is in her last year as a carer. The story is told through her memories at Hailsham, the cottages, and then her career as a carer. Hailsham is a school for clone children who are brought up in order to donate vital organs in their adulthood. Hailsham is a special school; the children live in an idyllic building in the English countryside where they live as normal children would. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Best Essays

    Ever since the birth of the first cloned sheep, named Dolly, the dream of human cloning has existed (Van Dijck, 1999). Cloning a mammal is described as the manipulation of an animal or human cell in order to create an identical copy of that animal’s or human’s nucleic DNA (Andrews, 1997). Though the dream of a human clone also comes with a lot of controversy regarding ethics and morals. Embryotic stem cell research, which could lead to a renewable source of human tissue, cells and eventually entire organs (Bowring, 2004), is highly controversial due to the necessity of placing a cloned embryo into a woman’s body in order to achieve that research. Politicians differentiate between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning as they refer to the second as “implanting a cloned embryo in a woman's womb” (Bowring, 2004), as for the embryo itself the research is not very therapeutic. Furthermore cloning by transfer of nuclei is not very effective yet as only 1% of manipulated sheep eggs reach adulthood and the number is even lower for other animals (Solter, 2000). The question whether human cloning will ever be possible and ethical remains to be answered but it seems certain that extra research in embryotic stem cells will improve techniques and success rates, which eventually brings the realization of a human clone closer one step at a time.…

    • 1944 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Giver is a book about a totalitarian government that controls its people by outlawing colors, pets and many things we take for granted today. In the dystopian society of “The Giver”, there are many differences from our modern society, some being the age system, the “family units”, and the economy and employment…

    • 54 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    These medical advancements allow people who have gone through accidents and endangerments to continue their lives without error by bringing more organs that can help them function more in life. They also allow for society’s standards of what is normal to fade away, opening people’s minds to new possibilities. These medical advancements have also angered various other people thinking that these practices are wrong and shameful, causing a lot of controversy for the subject of bioengineering. These…

    • 355 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    A utopia is a perfect society. One in which everything works according to plan, and everything is how it is imagined it should be. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984, utopian societies are built upon varying terms. Each society, while proclaimed to be perfect, has it’s inevitable flaws. The main characters in these novels, Winston and John, deal with the flaws in both similar and opposite ways. They are created to highlight the ways these utopian societies fall into dystopia, when looked at through an analytical lens. Winston and John have similar traits, as well as different traits, and their characters eventually find their way to almost identical…

    • 113 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Technology has a huge importance in our societies and as it dominates our daily lives, it has taken control over how we interact with others and how we learn. This need for technology can take us away from seeing the value of human life. Clones are thought not to have souls, to be mechanical and not capable of forming relationships or of developing strong emotions as humans would. Such a claim is made in order to justify the decision to use them for their organs, which may be unethical but in this novel is normalized. Humans in general in this novel further emphasize the point that they are cruel to those they consider “subhuman”. Never Let Me Go reveals that clones are dehumanized in order…

    • 1114 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Over the years, science and technology have expanded to make it possible to create identical creatures. While new cloning technology is a great advancement, it raises a plethora of moral and ethical questions. Cloning may bring about new ways to find cures for babies, according to Philip M. Boffey, but cloning also “could usher in a new eugenics”. The problems produced from the prospect of cloning greatly outweigh the benefits.…

    • 686 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Would it be so bad to have a world were all is good, no disease, famine, or illness; everyone is the epitome of their father and mother eyes and all those living in a world where cloning the norm. There are those in the here and now who see cloning, in all it facets, as a good and wonderful thing, to be done by all, if your hearts so desires. "Some among us are delighted, of course by the this state of affairs: some scientist and biotechnologist, their entrepreneurial backers, and a cheering claque of sci-fi enthusiast, futurologists, and libertarians (Winston & Edelbach, 2009)."…

    • 922 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagine world where scientist clone other people so that their organs could be donated. Never Let Me Go is a dystopian world in which human clones are created so that they can donate their organs as young adults. The novel follows the life story of Kathy, a clone who is raised at a boarding school for future “donors”. The guardians are manipulating their sense of duty and pride as children to accept the fate as organ donors and the clones never know the real purpose why they are created so they never try to escape Hailshaw.…

    • 877 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Aldous Huxley’s historic book The Brave New World presents a horrifying view of a possible dystopian future in which the society is procreated through scientific advancements. This society shows a civilization that is controlled only by scientific methods and is based on a stringent caste system. Huxley illustrates elements of an advanced society that is ultimately dissimilar from ours through its thoughts, feelings, and morals; however, its experiences with addiction resemble our own.…

    • 654 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In this two-part viewpoint, David A. Prentice and William Saunders discuss the science and the ethics of therapeutic cloning. In the first part, Prentice argues that creating clones for the purpose of embryonic stem cell research, called "therapeutic cloning," is no different from reproductive cloning, which creates a living human child. Also, he points out, therapeutic cloning is not therapeutic for the embryo. In the second part of the viewpoint, Saunders builds on Prentice's argument and goes even…

    • 3138 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Currently there are over one hundred and twenty three thousand people waiting on an organ transplant and every ten minutes another name is added. On average twenty-one people die every day waiting on an organ donation. However scientists all over the world, including Professor Ian Wilmut and his team at Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, believe that Therapeutic cloning would be the solution to combating these horrific numbers. They believe that with further research they could produce prefect-match organs that would not be rejected by a patient as it would be their DNA. This would mean that someone getting a transplant wouldn’t need to take immunosuppressive drugs as his or her immune system would not react. This claim would mean that no one would need to donate a single organ and go through the painful…

    • 953 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dystopian Society

    • 544 Words
    • 3 Pages

    A world composed of dystopian elements, hope and dreams are shattered, bashed by the greater power of the antagonist. Such a place of melancholy is unheard of in the society of today because the human race has been fortunate as to steered off from making those bad, negative decisions. Americans live head up high, carefree of the problems of 3rd world nations and arrogant when it comes to the topic of superiority all because of how spoiled they have gotten throughout the ages. They live such an easy, simplistic lifestyle. But in the tales of both Wall-E and Fahrenheit 451, ignorance and oppression has seized their once brilliant world. Human misery has been engraved into each of their members starting at birth and everything has turned into a test of brute force with only the strong surviving. It is a "dog eat dog world." Even though they both face misery and limitations, many elements between these two worlds are different. Those being how their societies are treated by their head leaders and many others.…

    • 544 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thesis Statement: Although human cloning is a scientific discovery of great significance which is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human it has some medical advantages; however, it raises high debates because of its religious, ethical, and scientific disadvantages.…

    • 412 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Satire On Cloning

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages

    For many years, scientists have been experimenting in the field of cloning. Cloning uses an egg cell and a somatic cell to make a duplicate copy of the organism. It is currently a highly controversial topic in the scientific world. Many people can benefit from cloning. From farmers to patients, not only does cloning help scientists discover more about genetics, it will also help a lot of people. However, there are also ethical issues with cloning, such as the use of embryonic stem cells and cross-species hybrids. For instance, at the Salk institute, a human-pig embryo was recently made and destroyed. The purpose of the experiment was to see if human organs could be grown inside a pig. The authors believe that we are still far off from accomplishing cloning of human organs in animals. I believe that cloning will help this world, but there needs to be restrictions on human cloning and cross-breeding.…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    J. (2015). Cloning humans? Biological, ethical, and social considerations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(29), 8879-8886. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1501798112…

    • 1194 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays