The Pieties of the Death Sentence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract

Since its publication in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel Never Let Me Go has become a popular text in literary studies, no doubt because it addresses, however obliquely, a number of the preoccupations of contemporary criticism. The novel has been cited not only in discussions to do with its immediate themes of cloning, technology and the idea of the post-human, but also in relation to narrative ethics, the culture of socialization and the welfare state, and the production of world literature and the globalized literary novel. Moreover, the reception of the novel has also coincided with the decade since the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004, during which time there has been, according to some commentators, a ‘post-deconstructive’ turn in literary theory against the work of Derrida. Claire Colebrook, for example, has characterized this period as showing a pronounced ‘affirmation of life’ and a (in her opinion) regrettable move away from the problems of language and textuality in literary theory towards concepts of affect, the body and vitalism: ‘Discontent, ill feeling, sentiment, sensitivity, emotion and affect: all these terms are now championed as ways in which the “linguistic” prejudices of an earlier era of high theory might be overcome’. It is therefore tempting to consider whether the success of the novel in any way reflects the decade’s alleged critical turn to ideas of life.