boocat answers “Can anyone explain me why didn't they all...”

Jamila Huseynova asked this question about Never Let Me Go:

Can anyone explain me why didn't they all run away from that place? Because I could not figure out that part.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[[SPOILER ALERT!!]
My first thought was that the clones/students grew up in an emotionally impoverished environment with no one who really loved them, so they developed no sense of their own worth as human beings.

Then as I advanced through the novel, I began to feel that the crux of the entire thing was whether or not they were human beings.

The offhand remark Kathy makes about her love, Tommy's, fate being "real horror movie stuff" after the fourth donation [something like that; I cannot recall the exact quote] made me feel that the tragic thing about the clones - one great horror of the novel - was that they actually WERE NOT human beings. Humans would have escaped somehow, pulled a "Romeo and Juliet", thus protesting their being viewed as commodities. But Kathy and Tommy didn't even think of this.

I feel this is the source of the vast revulsion the actual humans, Madam and Miss Emily, have for them - the clones appear to be human beings, the clones sound like human beings, but the clones are not human beings.

The ultimate horror of the story is that human beings would fiddle aspects of themselves into commodities, think nothing of breeding themselves down into "things", yet not have the guts to take a really creative leap and attempt to ADVANCE themselves into superior beings, people who could design a better choice - not getting cancer in the first place, for example, rather than passively accepting that it is their nature to get cancer and etc., every so often [as the clones accept it is their fate to be donors], and then designing spare parts machines [i.e., the clones] to use to "fix" their inferior, flawed human bodies. It is the humans ultimately who need to have the courage to take the leap and overcome their weaknesses rather than accepting them as "normal" and using up lesser creatures in order to continue limping along as the flawed beings the humans themselves actually are. The humans fail the challenge; the advances of the renegade/courageous scientist James Morningdale are viewed as a scandal, not a triumph. It was stated that people were horrified to imagine their children as born superior beings to themselves. [Love the name - Morning, beginning of a new day...or not, as the case may be.]

I feel this novel is effectively a mirror showing the weakness of fearful human beings unable to overcome their deficiencies and so submitting to being patched-up as the continually deficient species they actually are. It isn't the clones who cannot see their limited choices and escape them by some courageous act such as suicide, for example; it is the humans who cannot see that they are truly deficient and work up the courage to strive to overcome that condition, thus rendering the entire concept of clone-donors moot.

It's essentially the humans themselves who are hopelessly trapped. And that is the real tragedy of this novel. (hide spoiler)]

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Jorontin Qeraca I like your perspective!
Jan 08, 2018 09:17AM

Rachel This is so great, and explains the Morningdale thing really clearly.
Jan 27, 2020 02:54PM

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