5. Conclusion 13

References 14

1. Introduction

1.1 A Brief Introduction of Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go 

Kazuo Ishiguro was born on 8th November, 1954. He grew up in a Japanese family in the UK, which was crucial to his writing, as he said which enables him to see things from a different perspective from many of his British peers. He has several identities such as a Nobel Prize-winning English novelist, a screenwriter and a short story writer. As a Japanese-British writer, he is considered as one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received Man Booker Prize nominations four times and winning the award for his novel The Remains of the Day in 1989. His novel Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, was named by Times as the best novel of 2005 and was included in the list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015. Therefore, Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer who has distinctive personal features. Lots of readers and literary critics are captivated by his exquisite words and the plots which seem insipid. The author is curious about his writing style, too. 

The book, Never Let Me Go, is a dystopian science fiction novel. The main characters Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham-an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But after they grown up, all things have changed. Following the memory of Kathy, the book unraveled the mystery gradually. It was only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allowed herself to yield to the pull of memory and tried to make sense of the past. What unfolded was an extraordinarily powerful story in which Kathy, Ruth and Tommy slowly came to realize that it was their seemingly happy childhood that had haunted them ever since, even tainting their adult lives. As a consequence, from the readers’ aspect, the whole book was about finding secrets, which were about donation, caring, Hailsham, Madame and even miserable living of the clones.

1.2 Researches at Home and Abroad

As a very talented and productive writer, the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, once published, can always be widely noted. In 2005, his work Never Let Me Go was published, and won the Booker Prize at the same year. So the critics worldwide have given much more attention to this writer and his work.

Many critics have done the critical analyses about Never Let Me Go. There were some different opinions about Kathy’s characteristics, her actions and the language style the author adapted in this novel. For many critics, this novel was different not only because of the writer’s imagination of a world in which a large number of clones existed and organ donation was considered regular, but also because of its language style full of colloquial vocabulary, simple sentences and a lot of euphemisms (Guo Ping, 2016: 12). However, some critics maintained a very negative attitude towards the language style. It was said that Kathy’s “familiar, chattering way of speaking” was suitable for her, a young women lived in “the late 1990’s, England” but this kind of language style was “totally a faulty of this novel and that was the reason why it was less interesting” (Robbins, 2007: 289).This language style was quite different from the author’s several other novels. Some critics made such evaluation about Kathy: in the face of the death of her best friends, Ruth and Tommy, she showed a very indifferent state of mind. She was insensitive in mind and pale, weak in language (Zhu Xiaoli, 2013: 132). Daniel considered her “casual, gossip” narrative style made the novel boring and her “estranged tone” seemed to show that she was not distracted by her sad story and she was indifferent (2007: 99). 论《别让我走》中角色塑造对小说主题的影响(2):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_205924.html