Caring Is a Gift: Gift Exchange and Commodification in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Using a variant of the dystopian genre perhaps best described as alternate realism, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go presents an all too plausible response to a disturbing alternate reality. Published sixteen years after The Remains of the Day (1989) and set in the recent past, the novel depicts the experience of human clones raised from infancy at Hailsham, an exclusive and secluded boarding school in rural England where the students take classes, play sports, receive thorough medical care, and make art. After leaving Hailsham, the students join clones raised in less-privileged conditions and begin their partial integration into society. Soon after, they begin working as caregivers for other clones until receiving notice that their vital organs will begin being harvested. These are removed one at a time over a series of months or years. Clones die, or “complete,” by the time their fourth organ is removed in their twenties or early thirties. Even more shocking than the novel’s premise is its depiction of the coercive power of social conditioning. Remarkably, the clones do almost nothing to resist their fate. Though physically identical to humans conceived naturally, they do not attempt to flee or hide among those they consider “normal people” (83). Their greatest hope, which turns out to be nothing but a rumor, is that they may earn a few years of deferral if they can prove that they are in love. Near the end of her life, Ruth, one of the novel’s three protagonists, succinctly expresses the clones’s sense of resignation. Explaining her response to receiving her notice, Ruth tells her former boyfriend Tommy and best friend Kathy, “I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?” (227). For Ruth, the interrogative construction of her final sentence functions not as an earnest expression of doubt about an unethical system but merely as a tag question that invites, and assumes, confirmation from her fellow clones.

In seeking to identify the targets of Ishiguro’s dystopian narrative, several critics focus on the novel’s implicit criticism of harmful practices in contemporary market economies. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, for example, finds similarities between the clones’s function and the ways animals are used as commodities in our own society, arguing that “Ishiguro has written Never Let Me Go as a critique of anthropocentrism, the idea that is it is ethical or acceptable to sacrifice non-human animals to the needs and desires of human life” (224). Bruce Robbins locates a different target, claiming that Ishiguro directs his primary criticism toward economic inequality in the modern welfare state, where class determines opportunity almost as severely as the clones’s status decides their futures, and where institutions similar to Hailsham attempt to ease the poor’s sufferings without addressing their root causes, bribing them “with minor restitutions and supplements so as to divert [them] from deep and systematic injustice” (297). Focusing on a different form of economic constraint, Lisa Fluet reads the novel as an indictment of the psychological harm produced by the relentless demands of service work, which “offers only a perpetual succession of present moments that blur the lines between work and leisure . . . [and] preclude[s] the option of a down-time in which one could contemplate [a better] future” (285). My analysis of Never Let Me Go augments these readings by identifying an additional way that Ishiguro’s dystopia criticizes the labor and consumer practices of contemporary capitalism. Through his depiction of the clones’s experience, Ishiguro demonstrates how the principles of gift exchange can be perversely appropriated by the practice of commodification. This perversion of gift exchange is one of the primary strategies used to condition the clones to accept their fate.

Before I consider how this happens in the novel, it helps to distinguish gift exchange from the buying and selling of commodities. Poet and cultural critic Lewis Hyde examines this distinction in his wide-ranging study The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the...