Mourning One’s Own Mortality: Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Mortality is one of the aspects of the cycle of life that are feared by humans since it is inevitable. This article investigates Kazuo Ishiguro's work entitled Never Let Me Go, a dystopian novel set in England in a fictional world in the 90s, further. The novel tells the story of a woman named Kathy H. and is told from her perspective and highlights her life’s story growing up at a private school called Hailsham. The novel is analyzed using close reading through the lens of mourning and melancholia as well as the concept of memory. Kathy H.'s narrative of remembering and retelling past events is something that is emphasized in this study. It can be gathered that Kathy H.'s narration of remembering and retelling events in her past as an unreliable narrator and as a clone reveals herself as an individual and that telling her story is her way of coping with all the losses she experienced throughout her life and her way of accepting and mourning her own impending death.