Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go examines the boundaries of the human and tests the limits of empathy by introducing narrator Kathy H and her friends Ruth and Tommy, students at the boarding school Hailsham. What starts as a typical campus novel quickly takes on an uncanny quality as the reader slowly realizes that Kathy and her friends are clones, created to grow up and “donate” their essential organs for “real” humans. The novel and the narration turns on the question of the clones’ humanity. Can the reader believe that the clones are really human? Does their humanity matter to them or anyone else if they are slated for death?  I read the novel as existing at a fruitful point of intersection between many concerns of the conference, particularly the legacies of the Enlightenment and the role of the humanities in inventing the human.

While a contemporary novel of speculative fiction, the text has much kinship with the concerns and the investments of the Enlightenment and Romantic period. Karl Shaddox, for instance, argues that this novel is more comfortably classified alongside sentimental and abolitionist literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. While Kathy and her friends quietly assert their humanity, they also constantly feel the pull of the things around them, forming deep connections with non-human stuff. For instance, the clones’ concept of Norfolk as a “lost corner” functions as both a cosmic lost and found and their version of an afterlife. As such, Kathy herself begins to take on the qualities of an it-narrator, from the popular eighteenth-century genre featuring talking objects like coins or shoes. I examine the text’s roots in older literary forms to argue that the clones’ status as human or non-human objects is constantly adjudicated by their relationships with stuff. 

Indeed, Kathy and her friends have little contact with actual humans, who view the clones as distasteful and repulsive. Instead, they surround themselves with the material culture of the outside world, and particularly art. The novel seems as preoccupied in the fate of humanistic study as it is in the clones’ own humanity. Ultimately, I argue that Ishiguro is conflicted and ultimately pessimistic about the ability of the humanities to teach us about being human.