Stylistic features of the diary genre in “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

The article deals with the dystopia “Never Let Me Go” (2005) by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. The novel, chosen for our analysis, is the text of a diary, in which the main character’s memoirs are used to represent a transhumanist future. The main character of the novel, Kathy H., keeps a diary that defines the entire narrative organization of the text. The novel is seen as a postmodern example of an ongoing artistic tradition in which personal, private experiences, captured in Kathy H.’s diary, lead the reader through a fictional world. The article analyzes the genre and stylistic features of the diary to identify the narratological originality of the novel. The reception of the diary entries allows the reader to see how Kathy H.’s personality develops over time. This structure creates an engaging narrative approach that enables the reader to follow the psychological maturation and development of Kathy H.’s character and her journey of self-discovery. Kathy’s diary serves as an unreliable, but the only source of information in the novel. This allows the reader to adopt the protagonist’s emotional experience, to scrutinize her way of thinking and to plunge into her innermost world of desires. Taking the fictional world for a plausible one, the reader dives deeper into the narrative of the novel by the Nobel Prize winner in literature. This novel raises eternal and deeply philosophical themes, such as: humanity, memory, love, mortality and the meaning of life.