Education and (in)authentic mourning: Naturalness and artificiality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

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My analysis Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go aims to explore how the work of mourning relates to the artificiality of art as well as reality, and how this, in turn, relates to and affects education. In doing so, I engage with philosophical and theoretical works, such as Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’, Martin Heidegger’s important text ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, and Derrida’s exposition of the human, the animal, and the work of mourning in such works as Memoires: For Paul de Man, and ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’.