Stamirowska's Never Let Me Go

Stamirowska suggests that Kathy’s addressing an audience is not as self-serving as it is for some of the narrators in Ishiguro’s other novels such as The Remains of the Day (1989), in which the narrator, Stevens, seems to use his narrative to justify his actions. Instead, she claims that: ‘Kathy’s discourse refuses to play their narcissistic game of pretending to address others while they are really talking to themselves. It therefore possesses an ethical dimension impossible to achieve by those other selfish figures’ (Stamirowska 2011, 64). But Kathy’s narrative performance seems to be as much for herself as for any potential reader, if in fact the text is meant for a reader at all. It seems like an uncalculated performance of humanity, presented in the narrative medium in which she has encountered other performances of humanity. …show more content…
They have limited exposure to models of normal human life and behaviour, given that the only non-cloned humans they encounter during their childhood are their teachers and the occasional delivery driver. In this way, their conception of a human life is cobbled together from impressions of their teachers, their heavily censored education, the sometimes misguided information passed between the students themselves, and perhaps most importantly from textual representations of human lives. The novels that they read and films they watch are the only ways in which they can see a life as a perceived unity – as a