There were a number of elements of Never Let Me Go that intrigued me. The mysterious “outside”, the total lack of adults excluding the teachers and deliverymen, the details Kathy uses to describe Hailsham, and the easy fluctuation of past and future in Kathy’s memories (32). I have neither read Never Let Me Go nor seen the movie adaptation, but Kazuo Ishiguro’s use of words like “donor”, “donation”, and “carer”, along with the lack of dialogue about “what’s going to happen to [them] one day”, suggest that Hailsham’s students will not have typical lives (29).
The inevitability of the students’ futures seems to be a life of (organ donation?), based on hints left in the novel by Ishiguro, and Hailsham an institution designed to raise the donors for their purpose. Still, the first four chapters of the book present a number of unanswered questions about Hailsham and its occupants: Where the children’s parents? How young are they when they come to Hailsham, or do they spend their entire lives in the school? What is the significance of the Gallery? What aren’t the students being told about their futures? Combined, the information and lack-of-information about Hailsham paints a grim picture for both the students and for the state of the world that creates/perpetuates this system. I’m not yet sure whether Ishiguro’s world can be called a dystopia, but, if Hailsham is indeed raising children to raise their organs, it certainly is corrupt.
Within this (possibly) dystopian society, though, Hailsham succeeds by one standard to which our modern society often falls short. While reading Kathy and Ruth’s discussion about the obsession with poetry and the universal regard at Hailsham for talented poets, I was reminded of John Keating’s (Robin Williams) insistence to his class in Dead Poets Society that:
“medicine, law, business, [and] engineering [are] noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, [and] love … are what we stay alive for."
Hailsham is, I believe, a place of immoral action and questionable life purpose, but it raises students who value poetry over possession, no matter the poetry’s quality, in their Exchanges. Hailsham’s students are born to die, they have perhaps a better grasp on what Mr. Keating says “makes life worth living” than we do.