The Banality of Evil in Never Let Me Go
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The Banality of Evil in Never Let Me Go
Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is an example of the banality of evil and is unsettling
due to how realistic this story is despite being sci-fi in nature. The aspects of killing people in order to harvest their organs, the cultish nature of Hailsham, and the outside world ignoring the reality of the situation in order to reap the benefits, although are all fiction in this novel, all are things that happen today making the novel chilling to think about.
In the novel from a conversation that Mrs. Lucy had with the students she said that, “You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle- aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you were created to do.” (Ishiguro 81) Although today we don’t quite have the technology of cloning people we are not far away, scientists have cloned animals and, “ The success led to dire and fantastic predictions: Humans would be cloned” (Weintraub, Karen. “20 Years after Dolly the Sheep Led the Way—Where Is Cloning Now?” Scienctific American, Nature America, 5 July 2015, scientificamerican.com/article/20-years-after-dolly-the-sheep-led-the-way-where-is-cloning-now/.) Humans may not be cloned yet but animals already have been whoch makes the reality of cloning very real. Harvesting organs is another aspect of the book that is terrifying and harvesting organs isn’t even sci-fi from 1987- 2006, over 16,800 families have pursued lawsuits stating that their loved ones body parts were illegally sold for an estimated $6 million dollars. (Small- Jordan, Dianne. “Organ Harvesting, Human Trafficking, and the Black Market” Decoded Science, 23 Mar. 2016, decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-trafficking-black-market/) In the novel students are cloned and are created just to donate their vital organs. Despite the fact that we don’t have the technology yet to clone humans, we do harvest people for their organs so when we do have the technology for this it is not unrealistic to think that what happened in the book would happen in real life, making this facet of the novel horrific.
The students at Hailsham and all the other clones are kept in a controlled setting where they start off having no contact with the outside world where they sort of become brainwashed and Hailsham seems almost cultish which is another reason that this novel is frightening. The students are raised knowing that the only reason they were created was to do donations so they never really fought it and almost looked forward to it, “Don’t you sometimes wish, Kath, they’d hurry up and send your notice” (Ishiguro 282) The students of Hailsham and the other clones were so desensitized to their own death and others death that they just view it as, “The donors will all donate, just the same, and then they’ll complete.” (Ishiguro 282) Hailsham isn’t a cult but it is cultish in nature and we can look at examples like Jonestown where a total of 909 people participated in a mass suicide because they were all brainwashed to do so and although the clones arent killing themselves they are all willingly going to their deaths without questioning it because they were brainwashed into thinking that’s what they need to do and it’s scary that in this novel it can easily be compared to something like Jonestown.
Additionally this novel is frightening because of how the outside world addressed the donations. While some of the outside