The Journey Of Returning Home

Kazuo Ishiguro is the Nobel Prize winner of literature in 2017,a remarkable contemporary Japanese-British novelist,who was nominated for Man Booker Prize four times and won the 1989 award.His sixth novel Never Let Me Go was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.This novel is about a group of kids who were cloned for a reservior of organs.Despite the fact that all the protagonists of the novel are clones,which make it a science fiction,it's widely accepted that Never Let Me Go is nothing about science but rather a metaphor for humanity.Based on this view,this thesis argues that bereft of biological parents since their birth,the clones are a metaphor for the orphaned situation of contemporary individuals,namely cultural orphanhood and social orphanhood.Through a close reading of the text and by applying Stuart Hall's theory of cultural identity and diaspora,the postcolonial criticism and related studies of memory,this thesis looks into the metaphor of cultural and social orphanhood in this novel.The introduction section introduces the background of orphan images.The first chapter argues that students are cultural orphans since they renunciated their former cultural identity by disproving themselves as artists which leads to them becoming lost exiles,desiring for a new identity they were not able to obtain which features unhomeliness.The second chapter analyzes the metaphor of social orphanhood in perspectives of love,friendship and career.Though they had no parents since they were born,similar familial relations such as love and friendship were already built up for them but their identity as the suppressed deprived them of these relations and they ended up as social orphans,namely detached lovers,estranged friends and a lonely employee.The last chapter discusses how the two types of orphanhood were overcome by reactivating the memory of their shared past through which a spiritual home was reconstructed that accommodates their collective cultural belonging and restores their lost familial relationship.By presenting these metaphors of orphanhood,the thesis concludes that cultural and social orpahnhood is a common identity crisis faced by contemporary individuals.Ishiguro triggers a reflection upon this dangerous situation and attaches great significance to the concepts of never letting the past go and the imaginary home to resolve the crisis of identity.