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The appearance of human nature in the artwork of Kazuo
Ishiguros
Madina IRSALIYEVA 1
National University of Uzbekistan after named Mirzo Ulug‘bek
ARTICLE INFO
Article history:
Received February 2021
Received in revised form
20 February 2021
Accepted 15 March 2021
Available online
15 April 2021
Keywords:
Kazuo Ishiguro,
never let me go,
human,
humanity,
human nature,
characters of the novel,
imagination.
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a diachronic approach to Ishiguro’s
novels aiming at inscribing his last novel in a reflection on the
nature of humanity. Thus, Kazuo proved to have a delicate spirit
by being able to place unprecedented storms, hurricanes, and
great storms in a very convincing way. “Never Let Me Go”
31-year-old Kathy Sh. is based on the touching events of the girl’s
years of private schooling and her subsequent life. The author
skillfully depicts the love and donation of the protagonists
Tommy and Ruth, so that it seems natural for Kathy to become a
donor and donate her body parts to patients.
2181-1415/© 2021 in Science LLC.
This is an open access article under the Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ru)
Kadzuo Ishiguro badiiy asarida inson tabiatining ko‘rinishi
Kalit solar:
Kadzuo Ishiguro,
hech qachon meni qo‘yib
yubormang,
inson,
insonparvarlik,
inson tabiati,
roman qahramonlari,
tasavvur.
ANNOTATSIYA
Ushbu magola Ishiguroning romanlariga, uning so‘nggi
romanini insoniyat tabiatida aks ettirishga qaratilgan diaxronik
yondashuvni taklif qiladi. Shunday qilib Kadzuo nozik ruhiyat
egasi ekanini mislsiz po‘rtanalar, dovullarni, haybatli to‘fonlarni
sokinlik, vazminlik bag‘riga g‘oyat ishonarli tarzda joylashtira
olishi bilan isbotladi. “Meni qo‘yib yuborma” asarida 31 yashar
Keti Sh. ismli qizning xususiy maktabda ta’lim olgan yillarida
sodir bo‘lgan ta’sirchan vogqealar va undan keyingi hayoti asosiga
qurilgan. Adib shu qadar mahorat bilan asar qahramonlari
Tommi va Rutning muhabbati hamda donorlik taqdirini chizib
beradiki, natijada Keti ham donorga aylanib, o’z tana a’zolarini
kasallarga berishi tabiiy ko‘rinadi.
1 Lecturer of National University of Uzbekistan after named Mirzo Ulug‘bek, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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Облик человеческой природы в художественном произведении
Кадзуо Ишигуро
АННОТАЦИЯ
Ключевые слова; В этой статье предлагается диахронический подход к
Кадзуо Ишигуро, романам Ишигуро с целью вписать его последний роман в
никогда не отпускай меня,
человек размышления о природе человечества. Таким образом, Кадзуо
человеколюбие, оказался тонким духом, способным очень убедительно
человеческая природа, устраивать беспрецедентные штормы, ураганы и сильные
персонажи романа, штормы. Произведение «Не отпускай меня» основана на
воображение.
трогательных событиях, связанных с частным обучением
31-летней Кэти Ш. и ее последующей жизни. Автор умело
изображает любовь и пожертвование главных героев Томми и
Рут, что для Кэти кажется естественным стать донором и
жертвовать часть своего тела пациентам.
fama writer who wishes to write international novels.
What is an “International” novel? I believe it to be one, quite
simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to
people of varied backgrounds around the world. It may
concern Characters who jet across continents, but may just
as easily be set firmly in one small locality.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Introduction
The author of the words above Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and
moved with his family to the small town of Guildford, in southern England. He didn’t return
to Japan for twenty-nine years. He is known as a British novelist, screenwriter, musician,
and short-story writer. The genre of his works are fiction, science fiction and fantasy.
To date, Ishiguro has published eight books as well as many short stories, television and
film scripts. His career may seem disjointed when focusing on only the best-known novels,
“The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go”. And also the writer won the Nobel Prize
for his novel. According to J. Ardam a teacher in Colby College, Ishiguro won the Nobel
Prize because he writes about the human condition. The British well-known writer is
67 years old now, so he is being interviewed by several researches.
Literature review
The question of what it means to be human pervades Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never
Let Me Go, which gradually reveals a counterfactual twentieth-century England where
clone colonies provide ready supplies of organs for donation. Romantic-inspired views of
empathy rely on the claim that art reveals the human soul, Ishiguro's novel implies that
the concept of the soul invokes a fundamentally exploitative discourse of use value. In this
respect, Never Let Me Go shares in a pervasive late-twentieth-century cultural skepticism
about the viability of empathetic art. (Shameem Black)
Hannah Isaac elaborates on the following statement: “The characters in the novel
believe (or hope, or cling to the idea that) if clones are truly human, they have souls. These
souls can potentially be revealed through their artwork, but are most evident to the reader
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in the clones’ ability to feel and to love. Moreover, these are traits connected with human
nature and human identity in the world of the story, as the rumor about deferrals spreads
so thoroughly among the former students who cling to achance at prolonged love and life”.
According to Martin Semelak who is a PhD candidate at Palacky University in
Olomouc: In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, where the protagonist Kathy H.
gradually reveals the terrifying truth about the donation program and portrays herself and
her friends as victims of the atrocious establishment of the alternative England, the author
has opened numerous debates related to its theme: be it the moral and ethical aspects of
cloning, subject identity, bio politics or the problems of transhumanism.
Research methodology
“You had success with your fiction right from the start - but was there any writing
from your youth that never got published?” This thoughtful question was given byFrench
researcher Susannah Hunnewell in his interview in 2008. Kazuo Ishiguro answered: “After
university, when I was working with homeless people in west London, I wrote a half-hour
radio play and sent it to the BBC. It was rejected but I got an encouraging response. It was
kind of in bad taste, but it’s the first piece of juvenilia I wouldn’t mind other people seeing.
It was called “Potatoes and Lovers”. When I submitted the manuscript, I spelled potatoes
incorrectly, so it said potatoes. It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-
chips café. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they
never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them.
At the end of the story they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream
where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed,
the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to
marry”. Even in this unpublished story it is seen the view of human nature.
It can be said Ishiguro makes us who we are - that which is inside us, or that which
we make? Our perception of ourselves, or how others perceive us? In his novel “Never Let
Me Go”, Kazuo Ishiguro shows us a bleak alternate future in which humans mercilessly
breed clones to provide organs, thereby eliminating concerns over cancer and other such
illnesses. It is a novel about a group of young people who are also clones. These clones will
grow up and begin to donate their organs in their late teens and twenties and then they
will die slow, orchestrated deaths; their bodies will be used to save the lives of others. The
clones have been created by a vast government program and there is no escape from it.
The science is never fully explained, but it is clear that the clones are really no different
from the humans they come from, except for their origin and ultimate purpose determined,
of course, by humans. Ishiguro demonstrates the humanity of the clones through the
narrator, Kathy, her friends Tommy and Ruth, and the story of how they grew up at
Hailsham School, essentially a humane care center in which the clone children can learn
and develop. So the novel is narrated by Kath, who is a carer, which means quite literally
that she cares emotionally for other clones going through the donation process. In the first
paragraph of the novel, Kath tells us that she’s about to wrap up her work as a carer, that
she soon will become a donor. When the novel begins, we don’t quite know what this
means. We find out everything very slowly. In the well-known novel “Never Let Me Go”,
Ishiguro explores human nature through the eyes of characters who are not human, but
who make us question our humanity all the same.
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Analysis and results
In novel “Never Let Me Go” the students at Hailsham are taught that creativity is the
most important trait they can develop - art, and the artistic products they produce, drive
the social world of Hailsham School. Kathy tells the reader about the Sales and the
Exchanges, explaining how art fuels the student economy, and it becomes clear that social
standing is determined by artistic skill and being selected for Madame’s “Gallery.” Madame
is amysterious woman who visits Hailsham several times a year to collect the best art from
the children, and her Gallery later becomes the center of a conspiracy, a false rumor started
that it was used to determine which clones could be given more time to donate in order to
spend extra years with loved ones. In this way, art is equated with the soul, and therefore
with humanity itself. The children believe that the purpose of the Gallery is to show who
they are - they do not realize that it’s meant to show that they are at all.
When the adult Kathy and Tommy, now in love, find Madame and their former
headmistress Miss Emily in hopes of getting a donation deferral, Kathy mentions amoment
she had previously described to the reader, in which Madame caught her dancing to “Never
Let Me Go,” a sad ballad, pretending to clutch a baby to her chest: “You were... upset that
day. You were watching me, and when I realised, and I opened my eyes, you were watching
me and | think you were crying... Why was that?” (P. 270-271). Madame explains how she
interpreted the incident: “When I came in... I saw you, by yourself, a little girl, dancing...
I saw a new world coming rapidly... a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes
tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart
could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go” (P. 271-272).
In this moment, where Madame saw Kathy dance, and lovingly clutch something to her
heart, she finally saw the clone as something more than merely a creature - Kathy became
more human, a “little girl.” Kathy uses her body, what Madame thought was her only thing
of value, to create art and show emotion. Madame sees the awful truth in the words “never
let me go,” the truth that Kathy, and all the other clones she is in school with, will be forced
to let everything go; their relationships, their freedom, and their organs, therefore their
bodies and very lives, lives which have meaning and complexity just as human lives do.
“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more
finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (p. 261). Kathy and Tommy are shocked to
discover that anyone could think they didn’t have souls, especially given the love they feel
and the art they have produced for years. With this revelation, the hope starts to fade away
and misunderstanding takes its place.
Conclusion
Throughout the novel, we see clones interacting just as humans do - they form
friendships and rivalries, develop romantic feelings and jealousies, and they go in search
of their human counterparts. They create beautiful art and seek to better themselves
through knowledge and experience. There is nothing to separate them from humans, and
yet Miss Emily confesses that all humans, including herself, are afraid of the clones, that
every day she had to fight off her revulsion of them. So while we may want to think that
what makes the human is something good, like art and emotion, the message of the novel
is even more bleak than the world it presents - that what makes the human is the
willingness to keep others down to continue the status quo.
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References
1. Black, Shameem. “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics”. Modern Fiction Studies (2009.)
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