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Unlike Rushdie and Naipaul, who often use a lot of elements of Indian literature, religion and history or place colonial political criticism in their works, Ishiguro is an immigrant writer whose works were not limited to immigrant and national identity. Among his works, A Pale View of Hills described the tragic life of a Japanese widow immigrated to England; The Remains of the Day was a story about a steward of a English nobility mansion; When We Were Orphans (2000) was a novel based on Shanghai at the beginning of the 21st century; the latest Never Let Me Go (2005) was about clone men. His novels included many aspects of human beings from different culture. Ishiguro always named himself as an international writer which means in such a globalization world, novel has become an international literary carrier so he always aims at creating novels which can be valuable to people from any cultural backgrounds.
1.2 About Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go was a dystopian science fiction published in 2005 which was nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize and won a lot of other prizes. This novel was based on the period of 1980s and 1990s when the clone technology bloomed rapidly and later was adapted to a film in 2010 directed by the director Mark Romanek.
This novel is narrated by a clone woman Kathy H who grows up with her friends in a boarding school named Hailsham in England. Using Kathy’s memory as clues, this fiction describes the normal life of these un-normal clone people. After becoming adults, they have to donate their main organs to those normal people who gets sick. They are not treated as human beings but only medical tools to cure diseases. Kathy and her companions’ humanity and soul are ignored. They want to fight against this kind of unfair fate, at least they have tried. However, they are too weak to win. Mixing together with science fiction, inference, suspense and affection, this novel expounds the fragility and hope of humanity.
1.3 Literature Review
Since publication, this novel received a large number of comments from all kind of cultural fields. Without any doubt, every coin has two sides. This novel received reputations as well as criticisms.
1.3.1 Reputations
Never Let Me Go is a successful fiction from many points of view. Good reputations came like roaring waves. The New York Times commented that this fiction was “A Gothic tour de forceA tight, deftly controlled storyJust as accomplished [as The Remain of the Day] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming” (2005) while Time regarded it as “A page turner and heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish” (2005). Newsweek said that “Elegiac, deceptively lovelyAs always, Ishiguro pulls you under” (2005). This paper collects several research results from the following several aspects.
Never Let Me Go was regarded as a dystopian science fiction by almost all the readers and scholars. This novel described the tragic life of the clone men who would lose their young lives because of organ donations. The world Ishiguro created in this fiction is cruel and dystopian. Someone pointed out that “the novel envisions a dystopian civil society where clones struggle to comprehend the significance of their own circumscribed personhood” (Shameem Black, 2009: 785). And dystopian was regarded as one of Ishiguro’s topoi by saying “we propose to demonstrate, intertwined with the ethical implications of the way in which the novel reshapes the topoi of dystopian fiction” (Leona Toker, Daniel Chertoff, 2008: 163). In this novel, with his unique writing style, Ishiguro destroyed beautiful things to show to the readers in his seemed peaceful statements time and time again. Ishiguro expressed the topic of dystopian incisively and vividly, which left the readers with giant shock.