Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.

I wanted Kathy to mention this as something that doesn’t greatly move her one way or the other. As a point of information on the way to explaining about the dancing with pillow incident. This is one of a number of truths that the children in NLMG assimilate incrementally over years, rather than as a revelation, as they drift through a hinterland of ‘knowing and not knowing’. I wanted that for Kathy and her friends infertility would never become a huge matter at the fore of their minds. They never consciously anguish about it, never mind protest publicly. And yet I wanted the sense that it would steadily, stealthily, come to have a massive impact on their lives – on their attitudes, their decisions, even their feelings for one another. Cut off from the basic cycle of reproduction, this is another weapon denied to them in the face of mortality.