A promise of ‘The Good Place’: Dystopia in Kate Wilhelm’s The Funeral and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Abstract

Dystopia which is presumed to be the antonym of the word utopia instigates the idea that a given society is governed by a totalitarian regime in which constructs fear and anxiety to its people. In many dystopian texts, the main aim of the rulers is to create a better world according to their own ideologies by believing that they are creating a ‘utopia’. This conviction divides society into two; the ones who join the cause and the ones who are against it. However, the most loyal to the cause are the creators of the so called ‘utopia’ and the ones who are afraid to die. As a result, the promise of ‘the good place’ triumphs only to establish a community that is portrayed as oppressed with constant unhappiness. This article analyses both the individuals and the dystopian society while taking into consideration dystopian elements like totalitarian regime and fear, pseudo-utopia, and division in society that takes place in the short story The Funeral (1972) by Kate Wilhelm and the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. The purpose of this article is to investigate the concept of dystopia in these texts by engaging Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘administered world’, Plato’s ‘social classes’, Louis Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ and ‘Repressive State Apparatus’ along with his ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, Mihail Bakhtin’s ‘authoritative language’, and finally Michel Foucault’s ‘carceral society’ in connection with Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’.