Humanity’s Evil Ridden Existence
Mankind have not always ‘played
nice’ or been the best ‘sharers’. What
we find, we tend to keep and hold on to.
It’s our way of life and because we are simply animals, in Ishiguro’s
world within Never Let Me Go, it
demonstrates the ideal human existence.
By demonstrating the clones, he paints an unbiased image of what
humanity is and what we are capable of because we were able to completely strip
people to just our shells and in the end, butcher them for our glory.
This novel is relatable to the
Romans and in their Golden Age; thousands were massacred on the floor of the
Colosseum, the prize of many emperors.
This was one of the things which humanity frowns upon as we reflect on
our past but in all truth, our past is what makes our present. By the blood of the thousands dead in the
sand of sadistic glory driven killers, we learned how to cover up our evil
urges and deeds by attempting to justify them to some degree. After some saw through the emperor’s blood
lust, Christians replaced the slaves in the arena. Nero and many others claimed that they
deserved to die because they were different.
In the animal kingdom, those who are too different are put to death at
natures hand, whether she be swift through the claws of a predator or the
creature’s same species. Humans are the
same. Fate and Mother Nature play games
with out lives and weave out a tapestry as the Greeks believed. The three hags belonging to Fate weave, tie,
and snip away our existence with each other.
This concept of playing God and
exposing what humans are really made of it prevalent in Never Let Me Go because of the environment Ishiguro places the
characters in. The setting of England
has changed dramatically from what we see her as today, as any dystopian novel
likes to play off of. However, he brings
forth a world that bares the fruit of humanity’s darker labors and exposes how
much we try to cover up our lust for evil.
Our subconscious minds strive for what we presume as ‘good’, what we have been trained to feel as good. Inherently, we have lost what it means to be
‘good’ or ‘evil’. Few have considered
that one is actually both.
Cloning and other activities in
which the human race is destined to dabble in, creates a particular environment
which nature had never intended. The
sole act of creating a genetically identical being to one already in existence
is defying basic laws of nature and natural selection. DNA is never meant to be repeated to the
exact chromosome count and chemical makeup, nature has made that so. However when Ishiguro brings in clones to a
hurting world, similar to the fascist future that V frees England from in V for Vendetta, it opens up our darkest
fears. For it is no secret that we
humans fear what we do not know and Never
Let Me Go is something we all do fear.
Just thinking about the thought of having an extra body if yours should
fail is not as paralyzing as one might wish to believe, already showing how
numb we have become to valuing other life, but when that extra body reflects
the ideals and experiences of another human being, we fear deeply. These clones represent a mirror to the dirt
of humanity’s soul and how far we can stretch our tricks, telling ourselves
that we are really humane and understanding of life around us. We fail to miss how we would hypothetically
treat clones. Already such treatment of
other organisms is prevalent today in animal testing, where we shove down our
comforts on innocent life around us. The
fact that these creatures cannot emote as we do allows us to tell ourselves
that it is morally forgiven by our own ideal of mercy and justice.
Just as V believed, chaos will open
the eyes of Madame Justice when she has become infatuated with the diseased
ideal of right and wrong. Madame
Justice’s statue and symbol is that of a woman, a fellow homo-sapien. If we humans can personify such an ideal as
justice in the form of a fellow human, does that imply that we believe that we
have a structured concept of justice within our hearts or minds? The hypothetical treatment of the clones is
proof enough that we are incapable of stopping when enough is enough. Hailsham’s existence was for those in charge
to attempt to assure the world that these abominations, which we created, would
be treated ‘humanely’. According to the
dictionary, the adjective humane
means “having or showing benevolence or
compassion” (dictionary.com) but in Never
Let Me Go, “maybe the reason you used to [throw tantrums] like that was
because at some level you always knew”
(275) that things would never be as the authorities claimed they would be.
“The
fantasy never got beyond that-I didn’t let it-and though the tears rolled
down my
face, I wasn’t sobbing out of control. I
just waited a bit, then turned
back to the
car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be” (288 Never Let Me
Go).
This quote is the last few sentences of
the book and its significance is how it outlines the passion and passivity of
these clones. They became passive
because of how badly they lost what it means to be ‘human’. In a general sense, most of humanity today
does not truly understand what it means ‘to be’. We go through life as though it moves around
us and we push through it like a thick fog.
Instead of pushing back at what we call life, we need to let it pass
through us without loosing what it means to be active. ‘To be’ is not just a verb, but also a way of
life and describes the proper way to exist in a world where evil surrounds
you. Evil tempts you and promises the
sweeter fruits from the tree of evil.
Though humans know that fruit may taste better, we failed to see how
badly we would fall by sampling its deliciousness.
A ‘clone’ by definition is “an organism or cell, or a group of
organisms or cells, produced asexually from one ancestor or stock, to which
they are genetically identical” (dictionary.com). Really, they are just the shells of what we
deem as proof of human existence. We
look at our own bodies and believe that there is something more than a brain,
which dictates our lives and feelings inside.
We hope that there is more
around us than really is and that is why science is the bane of our
existence. It is the bridge upwards and
once you reach the top, do you see how far it plummets downwards into
destruction and nothingness.
Ishiguro reveals how science is
believed to be humanity’s cure from death that we fear most, but instead
reflects our true and deeper malignant nature.
We would so selflessly undermine another’s existence to preserve
ourselves which returns to Darwin’s theory of natural selection and nature’s
law. Even in literature, we keep
searching for monsters and explanations for what goes bump in the night. Never
Let Me Go gives us a flashlight in the dark and what we see staring back at
us is ourselves. We are the true
monsters and we are the true evil of this world.
V attempts to disregard the
government who has reduced the inhabitants of England to passive and silent
sheep. The clones too were dehumanized
to become animals that were eager to be herded and even at the end of the
novel, Kathy was herded off to her presumed doom.
Humanity’s fear creates a veil to
attempt to shroud our deeper and subconscious desires for eternal life, youth,
sex, and power. To the core of our
existence, we are reduced back to animals.
No matter how hard we try to shake what we really are, the three Fates will prevail. Mother Nature places us all back to our most
basic forms, just another organism trying to reproduce and compete for life.
In the end, we are nothing more than
our shadows and trickery. V held a
strong point, revealing to us that through our theatrics that we call daily
life, there are no ideals left to guide our motives for freedom. There shall always be evil but freedom is the
path to open more eyes to the capabilities of our ‘humane’ society and it’s
smoky mirrors. The true strength behind
our struggle against evil is the fact that “ideas are bulletproof” (V for Vendetta) and with ideas and with
freedom in a little chaos, mankind might be able to amend our evil spark.
