Human Identity And Humanity In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

In Ishiguro’s work of literature Never Let Me Go, he focuses on the complexity of human identity and humanity. The novel, set in Britain during the mid-1990’s, portrays an exposed world, where cloning humans are socially acceptable solely for the purpose of becoming organ donors for “real” people. In the institution Hailsham, students Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were secluded in the English countryside from the rest of the world. Essentially, the work demonstrates how human imperfection can disconnect people from the external world, often causing them to forget the present and lose themselves in the future. With close analyzation and peculiar behavior, the “clones” reveal that their self-identity is incredibly fragile, and can transform itself when others impose judgments upon them. Cultural criticism in literature pertains to the belief that individual human uniqueness develops in a mutual concession based on the “certain [societal] climate” (Ishiguro 266). A culture may set limits to which a person (character) is constrained, but an individual is capable of complying to settle or to alter those limits implied. As the character[s] realize that they can do nothing to change their fate[s], “[they] have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in [the] world” (266). Which in turn, can be evidently referenced to real-life situations as well. The field of cultural criticism is antidisciplinary, defending the fact that sociology (the study of social problems) cannot be