Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is written as a memoir of the main character Kathy H. as she looks back on her past at a boarding school called Hailsham in England. In particular, she recounts a boy named Tommy who was at her school, and he is horribly bullied. He has a nasty temper whenever he encounters these situations, and he ends up losing his cool and screaming and going on a rampage whenever he is bullied. What’s strange is that Tommy doesn’t fit the mold of the type of person who usually gets bullied in school. He seems to be a normal guy, and he is known for his athletic ability and his strength. However, he is also exactly the type of person who usually gets bullied at a school because he is very sensitive and heavily influenced by how people are around him. He initially gets bullied for the strangest reason: because he was shown special consideration for his art by the caretaker Sister Kathy, despite his art being laughably bad, and as a result, the other kids get jealous.

The creative arts at the school are very important. The kids gather all their works together and display them at these events for other kids to look and observe them and buy them. It is encouraged amongst the kids to buy each other’s arts and decorate their dorm rooms with them. However, Tommy is known for never really bringing any art to the events because his art is not very good, and the kids find reason in this to tease and ostracize him. I think Ishiguro uses Tommy's plight as a metaphor for fitting in and socialization. If Tommy, who is more physically active and gifted, rather than artistic and creative in a school community that focuses more on the latter, that effectively makes Tommy the odd man out. Tommy is no different from the poor kid who managed to get in solely on academic merit at a private school that primarily caters to wealthy kids.

Both the school and the novel are a window into a very interesting world. The kids themselves know that they live in a world in which the rest of the world pities them. Tommy knows this especially, and it is evident when he speaks to Kathy about Madame, the head caretaker, seeing her dancing with the pillow and pretending it’s a baby, “Madame’s probably not a bad person, even though she’s creepy. So when she saw you dancing like that, holding your baby, she thought it was really tragic, how you couldn’t have babies. That’s why she started crying.” Not only did I get a kick out of this line, I also felt that it showed a real world personality in Tommy. Also, this is where it is revealed that none of the kids can have babies. The reason why the kids can't have babies is because all the kids are clones of other people, and they are cloned from other people because their organs are harvested from them when they get older.

It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to be taken care of and cultivated for the sole reason of donating one’s organs, as both the reader and the kids find out. On one level, like Kathy says, it feels very much like a conspiracy theory. This entire time, you know that there is something going on in the background, but you can’t quite tell what it is. When you do find out, it sounds surreal, like their entire experience at Hailsham is one big science experiment, petri dish, or stem cell facility. What adds to this is the fact that none of the kids are given any real physical descriptions throughout the novel. They are essentially faceless, just a name. I feel that on some level, that is how the society wants to view the kids...not as people, but just future organs to be harvested, which protects their conscience, and which only adds to the sense of conspiracy.

The concept of this novel is very gothic to me. Knowing what I know about the true purpose of these kids, I can’t see any part of their existence as happy per say. I see their life from the position of the humanitarian/spiritual idealist within me, which is how most people would view these concepts from. Part of the reason the kids are required to paint and showcase their painting is because the school itself IS an experiment to prove that these cloned kids have souls, regardless of being clones, and that harvesting organs from them is wrong.

The idea of questioning whether or not these kids have a soul is ridiculous. Someone could say that there is evidence of it in the when one of the kids starts to make her and her boyfriend imitate the couples they watch on TV after they move out of the school. A person could say, “Because Ruth does not know how to express love due to being a clone of a human rather actually than being a human, she learns to do it from watching on tv, which clearly shows she has no 'soul'. She is just an empty shell that thinks it’s human, wants to be human, but just isn’t”. However, this argument has several holes in it. How Ruth is learning is EXACTLY how humans learn. We learn by observation: we observe each other to learn facial expressions, how to speak, how to act our gender, and to learn the knowledge we have in our heads. How many times have we heard, “Well I believe this because this is what my parents/family believes”? That does not mean that a person has no soul if they learn modes of expression from others. If anything, it proves that these cloned kids DO have a soul.

The cloned kids, no matter what anyone says, are living, breathing, decision-making, emotional human beings. I think the only reason they are seen in the opposite perspective is because it is much easier to harvest organs from them and treat them a certain kind of way if the society thinks they don’t have souls. The way they are treated and seen as is the same way we treat the animals we use for food. Our food industry is one of the largest fallacies we have in our society, but it’s easier as humans to do that to animals. However, to do that to humans, certain steps must be taken to protect the society from the internal, moral backlash they feel in THEIR soul when they think about what they are actually doing. The idea that the kids have to prove that they have a soul through the art they draw doesn’t even sound like a real thing. It sounds like a lie the society created for themselves to feel less guilty about the clones, but they don’t actually mean it. Part of me got a little upset reading this novel, only because our society does do this to people and to itself.