Kathy's Memory and Narrative Never Let me Go Oscar Williams College

In Never Let Me Go the themes of death and memory are foregrounded. In acquiescence to her own mortality Kathy returns to the past to construct a narrative that reconnects her to her dead friends. Her narrative becomes the material of memory “being organised as we listen” (Mullan 107). Before recounting her childhood, Kathy mentions a donor, close to ‘completion’, who asks her about her childhood at Hailsham. Kathy realizes that “What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood” (5). This encounter draws attention to the artificiality of memory and “how one uses memory for one’s own purposes, one’s own end” early in the novel (Mason 347). Kathy’s reconstructive narrative reveals the consolatory power of memory in the face of mortality.

Memories are inherently fragile and fluid, vulnerable to both inaccuracies and unconscious alteration. Ishiguro admits to being “fascinated intrinsically by memory” and using it as “a technical device […] to enter a world of memory” (Groes 258). Kathy’s narration draws attention to its own unreliability through confessions, such as “This was a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong” and “I don’t remember exactly” (12,...