Kazuo Ishiguro has initiated a sense of empathy by displaying a strong sense of emotions and feeling through each character. The novel Never Let Me Go encompasses the various contrasting personalities and realizations through dialogue and interaction. The three main things that inaugurate empathy in the book are the cognizance of one’s identity, the effect it has on themselves and their daily lives.
The realization of one’s identity has several influential factors, such as the way others view them. Kazuo Ishiguro develops empathy by revealing the truth through the teachers’ characters. In the first setting, Hailsham, the clones are unaware of their natural being and are kept in the dark, which was thought to be beneficial later …show more content…
As they experience living in the real world, their perception changes. When Ruth and her friends go to Norfolk to pinpoint Ruth’s “possible” and are disappointed to find out their conjecture wasn’t true, Ruth says, “ We all know it. We're modeled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from. We all know it, so why don't we say it?” (pg. 333) Ruth has low self-esteem and thinks of her kind as “trash.” “If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from.” (pg. 334) The words “junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps, convicts” are all negatively meant to the affect the reader - as these are all types of people who haven’t been successful in life and are looked like a downgrade in society. Even though Ruth is the one that says these things, she speaks for everyone because she says “We all know it, so why don’t we say it?” showing the universal thought process of theirs. Only somebody that is so disturbed by their own identity speaks in such a way about themselves. Hearing their view of themselves made me feel empathetic towards them as they are always looked down upon by society, and this is the result. It matters in the context of the novel because this was one chapter/scene where the clones felt terrible about themselves and say it - usually, the author talks about the conflicts in relationships, and there isn’t a lot of a reaction of their identities present in the