Who am I? Modern Dystopia and Identity Struggles in Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Never Let Me Go"
Who am I? Modern Dystopia and Identity Struggles in Kazuo Ishiguro’s

Author: Julia Rabbe

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13: 3346155986

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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: Who am I? This is a question we frequently ask ourselves, which is not easy to answer. Human beings naturally try to answer the identity question and it is one of the essential processes of growing up. But if we imagine ourselves living in a world in which one’s whole life is predestined and it is impossible to escape from this destiny, it seems impossible to answer such a question. The dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro is set at a boarding school in England at the end of the twentieth century. The protagonists in the novel, who are growing up at the boarding school Hailsham, face the above-described problem. They are brought up healthy and kept away from every danger possible, to live the life they are supposed to live. They finish school, move in groups to farms where they have to work, they become carers temporarily, until they end up becoming donors of their vital organs. Around the time they have done their third or fourth donation, their short life will be completed. This leads to a struggle of finding identity and to the question, what identity really is. In this term paper, the question of how the characters deal with the predestination of their lives will be answered. It will be discussed, in which ways they try to build up an identity, even though they face some problems. The central thesis, therefore, is that the social groups the protagonists live in and identify themselves with, make an important contribution to the formation of their identity and the process of finding belonging.

Who Am I? Modern Dystopia and Identity Struggles in Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"
Who Am I? Modern Dystopia and Identity Struggles in Kazuo Ishiguro's

Author: Julia Rabbe

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 9783346155993

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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: Who am I? This is a question we frequently ask ourselves, which is not easy to answer. Human beings naturally try to answer the identity question and it is one of the essential processes of growing up. But if we imagine ourselves living in a world in which one's whole life is predestined and it is impossible to escape from this destiny, it seems impossible to answer such a question. The dystopian novel "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro is set at a boarding school in England at the end of the twentieth century. The protagonists in the novel, who are growing up at the boarding school Hailsham, face the above-described problem. They are brought up healthy and kept away from every danger possible, to live the life they are supposed to live. They finish school, move in groups to farms where they have to work, they become carers temporarily, until they end up becoming donors of their vital organs. Around the time they have done their third or fourth donation, their short life will be completed. This leads to a struggle of finding identity and to the question, what identity really is. In this term paper, the question of how the characters deal with the predestination of their lives will be answered. It will be discussed, in which ways they try to build up an identity, even though they face some problems. The central thesis, therefore, is that the social groups the protagonists live in and identify themselves with, make an important contribution to the formation of their identity and the process of finding belonging.

The quest of identity in a modern dystopian novel
The quest of identity in a modern dystopian novel

Author: Line Schneider

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2019-08-21

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 334600161X

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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: A Survey of British Literature, language: English, abstract: The question of real identity is often raised by readers while reading books concerning dystopian worlds and societies. This term paper will discuss the quest of identity and elements of the utopian contemporary school society described in a novel from this decade, titled "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. In the novel the protagonists have a shorter life span than regular human beings. This, and the fact that their lives have been planned and predetermined to one day become organ donors leads to the struggle of identity and what identity truly means. Furthermore, the paper will focus on the use of ambiguous terminology used in the novel and how it manipulates the reader’s emotions and impressions. Specific words are being used, which the reader does not immediately link to the words meant by the narrator. To analyse the novel on the aspects of the identity quest, Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory and his thesis will form the basis of the work: Social groups are essential and crucial for an individual’s identity. The quest for identity always has been part of human nature. Just as imagining and fantasizing about perfect worlds and living in perfect conditions always has been. Humans enjoy visualizing a better place resulting from their dissatisfaction and disappointment in their societies. Not only utopias, also dystopias occupy the human mind. Both, ideal and non-ideal imagined worlds can help to analyse and improve one’s own and already existing world and society or also be identified as a warning against contemporary trends.

Character and Dystopia
Character and Dystopia

Author: Aaron S. Rosenfeld

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-08

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1000173194

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This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

When We Were Orphans
When We Were Orphans

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2001-01-16

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0375412654

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From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes this stunning work of soaring imagination. Born in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition—and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.

Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2009-03-19

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0307371336

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NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • The moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic from the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and Klara and the Sun—“a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist. “Brilliantly executed.” —Margaret Atwood “A page-turner and a heartbreaker.” —TIME “Masterly.” —Sunday Times As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780571272129

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In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.If you enjoyed Never Let Me Go, you might also like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, now available in Faber Modern Classics.

Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction
Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction

Author: Annika Gonnermann

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2021-04-19

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 3823302558

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Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction focuses on the relationship between literary dystopia, network power and neoliberalism, explaining why rebellion against a dystopian system is absent in so many contemporary dystopian novels. Also, this book helps readers understand modern power mechanisms and shows ways how to overcome them in our own daily lives.