A Lacaniad Study Of Posthumau Subjectivity In Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro is becoming one of the most celebrated contemporary fictionauthors in the English-speaking world. Noted for his precisely structured stories, theworks of Kazuo Ishiguro reaches beyond national and linguistic boundaries, despiteits specificity in time and place. Captured the runner-up spot in the2005booker prizeawards, his latest novel Never Let Me Go is acclaimed to become Ishiguro’s mostculturally and intellectually important book. This thesis, by doing a Lacanian studyof the subjectivity construction in Never Let Me Go, hopes to do a full justice to hisliterary talent, not only as a best-seller writer, but also a master with a philosophicalinsightfulness in human existence.The present thesis, following the track of the Lacanian psychoanalysis, hasdivided the novel’s fictional universe in three parts: the world of clones, the world ofHailsham, and the world of men. By investigating the meanings implied for eachsymbolic world in the heroine’s life, the thesis purposes to argue the heroine’scoming to the age process is actually the same process human subjectivity developsfrom premodern to postmodern. In doing so, it comes to a conclusion that incomparison with the posthumanness in premodern and postmodern patterns ofsubjectivity, the modern definition of man’s subjectivity seems so insufficient that itshould be extended and supplemented by something other than man himself.