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"Shadowy Objects in Test Tubes": The Ethics of Grievance in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
- Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 19, Number 4, 2017
- pp. 421-440
- Article
- Additional Information
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abstract:
Every community demands sacrifices from individuals within it, and sometimes such sacrifices can be extreme. To experience harm related to this sort of sacrifice is to be in a state of grievance. Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go offers readers a compelling fictional account of severe grievance experienced by its narrator-protagonist and other clones destined to die young when donating their organs to non-clone, or "normal," members of their community. By presenting radically aggrieved clones as visibly indistinguishable from the "normals," Ishiguro dramatically challenges traditional understandings of the state of grievance and compels readers to re-examine their own reactions when confronting the spectacle of grievance.