Human Rights Storytelling and Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Abstract

This article examines Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go as a type of Bildungsroman that presents coded models of contemporary human rights issues. It shows how autobiographical storytelling functions within the novel as a form of rights claim that gives voice to the suffering of an oppressed social group. The article demonstrates how the text grapples with the effects of storytelling on individual psychologies, both as a constructive response to atrocity and as a potentially dubious method of overcoming traumatic experience. It also underscores Ishiguro's sensitivity to the ways that aestheticized forms of traumatic experience are consumed by the general public with a mixture of empathy, indifference, and perversion.