Could you elaborate your thoughts on Never Let Me Go to include, the spoiler, specifics? I found them really v interesting so far but could only have apply them to the text.
Sure. (Spoilers below)
So, the most straightforward “dilation” in Never Let Me Go has to deal with mortality. As the story intended me to, I felt a sense of outrage at the short lives of the organ donor characters, at the way they had to choose what to do with themselves so quickly and with so little room for second chances. But on reflection – and the story clearly intended me to reflect in this way – that sense of outrage seemed no different from the sense of outrage I sometimes feel at mortality in the real world.
I listened to an interview with Ishiguro about the book in which the interviewer (Michael Silverblatt) said it was interesting that the characters spent so little time asking what seemed like the big, obvious questions about their existence (why am I here? was it morally acceptable to create me?) and instead focused on seemingly minor questions (why did they ask us to make art?). Ishiguro said this was intentional, and was meant to mirror something we do in our own lives. So part of the argument seems to be that no matter what my expected lifespan is, I will find it “outrageous” that it isn’t longer when I think about it directly enough, and I will also generally avoid thinking about it directly, distracting myself with more trivial but less disturbing matters.
But the most powerful part of the analogy for me was something else. In trying to relate to the characters, I kept thinking, “these people are trying to make something dignified and meaningful out of lives that were, from the start, intrinsically ‘fucked up,’ broken, wrong. They have to start with the feeling that things are ‘not as they should be’ – and in a grotesque fashion – and either grin and bear it with dignity (which could itself be a kind of defeat) or struggle against it (and perhaps give in to vain hopes).” But then it occurred to me – and IIRC this was when I first “figured out” the metaphor – that this was how I already saw my own life and the world. I’m used to the headlines seeming like tasteless satire, and to viewing many people’s lives (including my own) as responses to some traumatic moment(s) at which things “went wrong,” at which the chance for “the normal, correct sort of life” was wrenched away.
Thus the organ donor premise allows us to stand outside that sort of life – the kind that “begins with wrongness, and must pick up the pieces from there” – without any of the psychic defenses we have developed to shield ourselves from the feeling of wrongness so we can go on with mundane activities. And then, after situating us outside looking in, it says, hey, remember, your life is like this too.
(I assume this was in the book too, but near the end of the movie the narrator explicitly said something like “I’m not sure the people we helped lived lives much different from ours.” I found this almost irritating in a funny way, since I had been proud of myself for coming up with this idea just 10-15 minutes of screentime earlier.)
