The Artists Of The Clone World:Artistic Metaphors In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go, as the sixth novel of Kazuo Ishiguro with a cosmopolitan view, described the tragic life of the clone donators. In critiques at home and abroad, it was analyzed as a scientific novel fixing on the conflict between technology and morality. This paper avoids the popular approaches above and focuses on the novel’s element of art, trying to explore another identity of the clone protagonists:artist, as well as the metaphorical implications that art and the identity of artist wanted to express. The feature of art and the metaphorical meanings of the novel have appeared in some critiques abroad. But most of them only touched the theme and had not deeply excavated the indications. Neither had there been any critique combining the two features of art and metaphor together. According to this paper, in the metaphorical context, the clones are vehicles for human beings while the protagonists are vehicles for human artists. As artists, the protagonists acted as the spokesmen for the collectivity. The identity of artist distinguished them from other members by endowing them with special capability and mission that other members didn’t have. Their artworks, as the reflection of the collective unconsciousness, revealed the collective ideology. However, in their career, the artists’creational works were disturbed by lots of oppression. They had to struggle between Eigentlich and Uneigentlich both in their life and in their artistic career, which became the root of the inevitable absurd in their life. The three protagonists who graduated from the art school Hailsham:Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, were representatives of three types of artists. Ruth was the one indulged in Geworfenleit. Comparatively, Tommy kept most Eigentlich in his artistic creation, which he had been oppressed by and despised for. Kathy was another different model compared with Ruth and Tommy. Psychologically, she often had ideas different from the normal state Uneigentlich, but was meanwhile controlled by Uneigentlich in her activities, which made her feeble in personality. The most qualified real artists represented by Tommy, became the model pioneers for the collectivity’s battle against absurd. Art, as Camus had stated, became the weapon for the revolution. Meanwhile, the aim of a deferral for the donation symbolized the eternal motif of humanity:freedom. In the end of the novel, though the artists’dream of a deferral did not come true, it did not indicate the failure of the battle against the absurd, since the whole story of the novel could be seen as an excerpt from the collectivity’s history, in which pioneers began to realize the existence of absurd and made effort to overcome it. Also, it forecasted the awakening of the collectivity and the coming of the final revolution. The artists actually stood for the pioneers bearing this spiritual oppression. They sacrificed in order to get rid of the absurd situation and achieve the progress of humanity.