Never Let Me Finish: Ishiguro's Interruptions

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go forces us to consider how the condition of interruption shapes the subject's ability to "read" (interpret) people, situations, and larger structures of meaning. I couple existing criticism of Ishiguro's self-consciously flat lexical style—prose meant to mimic a corresponding and tedious flatness in the perspective of the clones, filled with equivocation, fuzzy descriptors, and syntactic repetition—to the novel's use of interruption, both in terms of representation and reader response. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book, I put the question of cognitive imagemaking (as readers) into dialog with phenomenon of interruption. Interruption, I argue, is the binding agent for the novel's deadened lexicon, the mechanism by which imagination and critical meaning are systematically crushed into what Scarry refers to as the inert, evanescent, and ineffectual shape of daydreaming. In this way, Ishiguro asks readers to consider the conditions that interrupt and thereby foreclose the act of social critique.