Never Let Me Go

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-9

Part 2, Chapters 10-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-17

Part 3, Chapters 18-20

Part 3, Chapters 21-23

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Symbols & Motifs

“Never Let Me Go”

As a girl, Kathy becomes obsessed with a song titled “Never Let Me Go” by the fictional singer Judy Bridgewater. She listens to the song repeatedly while she is alone though she does not really understand the romantic implications of the lyrics. She imposes her own meaning on the song, and the song becomes a metaphor for her exploration of her feelings. Kathy chooses to believe that the song is about a mother who has a baby after being told that she could not. The mother sings the song to the baby and never wants to leave her. The students at Hailsham are all orphan clones who cannot have children of their own. The song allows Kathy to explore feelings of motherhood and abandonment that she does not fully understand. The song is a representation of the stunted emotional capacity of the children, who have not been taught the full ramifications of their situation. The tape represents Kathy’s attempt to tackle these issues.

Madame watches Kathy dance to the song while cradling a pillow. The sight of the young clone girl makes Madame cry. Later in the novel, Madame confesses that she did not understand the emotional meaning that Kathy projected onto the song, but Madame projected her own emotional meaning onto the sight of the girl with the pillow. The song again becomes a conduit for emotional projection. Madame hears the song and sees the child reacting to the song, and the moral issues surrounding the clone children suddenly come into focus. Madame fights for the right of the clone children to be viewed as ordinary human beings rather than just vessels for organs. The child’s ability to impose emotional meaning onto a song becomes a symbol of her ability to think and feel just like a regular person. The song symbolizes the complexity of the emotions the children can feel as well as the dire situation in which they find themselves. Madame understands this symbolism, and it moves her to tears.

One of the most important symbolic aspects of the song is the irony of the title. “Never Let Me Go” means so much to Kathy, but she spends her life slowly letting go of everything. She watches Ruth and Tommy die. She lets go of Hailsham and her nostalgia. She lets go of her career as a carer, of her dreams of a referral, and of the last vestiges of hope she has. Kathy listens to “Never Let Me Go” on repeat because she relates to the desire to cling on forever in a world that is pushing her to let go of everything she loves.

Norfolk

Norfolk is a county in the east of England that has several important symbolic meanings in Never Let Me Go. The characters visit Norfolk and experience one of the most important days of their lives. Ruth sees her possible, Chrissie and Rodney talk about the deferrals, and Tommy and Kathy find a copy of the beloved cassette tape Kathy lost. Because of the importance of this day, Norfolk comes to symbolize different emotions for different characters. For Ruth, Norfolk is where her dreams of working in an office died. For Chrissie and Rodney, Norfolk is the place where they learned that their dream of a referral is doomed. For Tommy and Kathy, Norfolk is one of the few fleeting moments in which they experience what their lives might be like if they were together. The symbolic meaning of Norfolk is positive for some characters and negative for others, but it is always tragic. The physical location of Norfolk symbolizes broken dreams and unrequited love.

The novel also explores the idea of Norfolk as an abstract concept. As children the characters joke about Norfolk being the home of lost things. Norfolk provides a natural home to lost possessions and lost people. They find the lost cassette tape in Norfolk, and Ruth tries to find the lost conception of herself. This version of Norfolk is not real, but it brings the characters together. The characters grow up lost and disillusioned, so the nostalgic idea of a home for lost things brings them together at the end of their lives. Their reunion is them returning to the abstract idea of Norfolk, the important place from their youth that has the power to reunite lost things.

Tommy and Ruth die, and Kathy returns to Norfolk alone. She drives along the lonely roads and pulls over beside a barbed wire fence. Garbage has caught on the sharp spikes and blows in the wind. Kathy thinks about the home for lost things and everything that she has lost. She imagines her friends returning to her, but she knows that the dream of Norfolk is dead. The symbolism of the location has changed. Now, Kathy sees their lives as being just like the pieces of garbage caught on the barbed wire. They tangle in the wind and achieve nothing. The clones are considered nothing more than human garbage by the society, and even the symbolic power of Norfolk cannot bring them back together or return what has been lost.

Organs

The clones are created to donate their organs to the rest of society. The organs become small organic metaphors for the clones’ reason to exist. The organs justify their creation and the life they spend in facilities. Everything about the clones’ lives is arranged to maximize the usefulness of these organs; as such, their organs become important symbols for what the clones mean to society and what the society means to the clones.

Society views the clones’ organs as something to be taken away. The removal of an organ from a clone is a natural process, and the morality of this procedure is generally not questioned. To ask questions about the process would be too difficult and would potentially undermine cures for some of mankind’s most terrible diseases. Each organ removal symbolizes the complicity of society. The removal of the organs is a symbolic process in both directions: The violence and the immorality of the action symbolizes the way in which society has fully accepted the sacrifice of the clones’ lives, while the slow removal of the vital components of the clones’ bodies symbolizes the way in which society nurtures and then hollows out the clones. The harvesting of the organs symbolically damns society at large while symbolizing the short life and explicit purpose of each individual clone.

The harvesting process means that the organs of the clones become a symbolic battleground for the moral status of society. People like Miss Emily fight for the clones to be recognized as more than just farming instruments for organ donation, but this battle is unsuccessful. More importantly, the clones themselves have no idea that this battle is taking place. Their bodies are symbolic representations of a moral tussle at the center of society, but they are so far removed from reality that they do not understand the nature of their existence or the symbolic meaning of their own organs. The clones are isolated and alone, and the lack of awareness of the symbolic meaning of their own bodies is a reflection of their isolation. The symbolism of the organs criticizes society not just for harvesting the clones’ body parts but also for hiding the truth from the people who are most affected.