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134396

Purity in a Malevolent Harvest: Ustopianism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)

Article

Last updated: 05 Jan 2025

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Tags

اللغة الإنـجليزية وآدابها

Abstract

In a continuous search for perfection, it is possible that one day human body organs will be harvested. This is the premise of the dystopian novel Never Let Me Go by the Japanese-born British author and Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro. The novel provides a possible fate of the human race in the event that we keep chasing longevity. It depicts an English school in the 1990s in which children are farmed for their organs. Such children are conceived only for scientific purposes and they are not told that they are clones or that the only purpose for their existence is to donate their organs after becoming young adults. Applying Margaret Atwood's term ‘ustopia,' a term coined through merging the two terms ‘utopia' and ‘dystopia' that highlights features these terms have in common, to Ishiguro's novel, this paper aims to shed light on the elements of utopia within Ishiguro's dystopianism. I claim that Never Let Me Go, besides serving as a warning, provides hope through questioning the concept of absolute evil and focusing on the idea that there has to be some degree of goodness even in apparently evil situations.

DOI

10.21608/aakj.2020.134396

Keywords

Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro, Ustopia, dystopia, Utopia, cloning

Authors

First Name

لبنى

Last Name

محمد عبده شداد

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

کلية الآداب - جامعة أسيوط

Email

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City

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Orcid

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Volume

22

Article Issue

72

Related Issue

20052

Issue Date

2019-10-01

Receive Date

2019-09-15

Publish Date

2019-10-01

Page Start

297

Page End

322

Print ISSN

2537-0022

Online ISSN

2537-0030

Link

https://aakj.journals.ekb.eg/article_134396.html

Detail API

https://aakj.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=134396

Order

8

Type

بحوث علمية محکمة

Type Code

1,667

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

المجلة العلمیة لکلیة الآداب-جامعة أسیوط

Publication Link

https://aakj.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Purity in a Malevolent Harvest: Ustopianism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)

Details

Type

Article

Created At

23 Jan 2023