Jordan’s Reviews > Never Let Me Go > Status Update

“So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible, about the way we were now thinking and planning.”

“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.“

“I had this idea at the time—and I was probably right—that if our sense…was allowed to seep away, then so too would whatever bound us together as Hailsham students. That’s why I tried for a while to keep going our enthusiasm…but…it soon began to feel like a lost cause.”

“I didn’t exclaim…I stood there quite still, looking at [it]… For a second, it even felt like a mistake. [It] had been the perfect excuse for all this fun, and now it had turned up, we'd have to stop. Maybe that was why, to my own surprise, I kept silent at first; why I thought about pretending never to have seen it. And now it was there in front of me, there was something vaguely embarrassing about [it]”

Ahhh. After Chapter 12 I think I know where this is going to go, thematically. I should’ve known, coming from Ishiguro.

That completes Part 1. From the beginning, I’ve noticed the narrator Kathy’s nervous rambling as she recounts her memories at Hailsham. And yet she speaks about, uh, pretty serious developments with a kind of nonchalance. Might this suggest an outer resignation to whatever lies ahead, but with inner trepidation?

“Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.”