Week One of Never Let Me Go: "My name is Kathy H."

On the narrative perch in Chapters One through Four

[First, I’ll note that many of the sources linked in the body of this post contain “spoilers” about the novel. Spoiler-free readings are linked at the very end of the post as Extra Credit.]

Welcome to the kickoff post for my series reading Never Let Me Go, over a month, in honor of the novel’s twentieth anniversary! (You can find the initial announcement post here.) And now on to the good stuff!

I think what first strikes me every time I open this novel is the voice: it is so assured, so consistent in its tone and theory of mind, so clearly a person. You could read the whole novel just for studying the way that Kazuo Ishiguro does it. By voice, I mean narrative voice, which also relates to the concept of narrative perch, or everything about the angle from which the story is being told. In one of her great posts about POV, Rebecca Makkai lays out some of the aspects of narrative perch:

• Who is telling the story, and what their deal is;

• To whom, theoretically or literally, the story is being addressed;

• When, in relation to the story’s events, the story is being narrated; and

• For what purpose the story is being narrated (and I don’t mean why are you writing it, but why, in theory, in the world in which this story is true, it is being told at all).

For me, the first couple pages address all these questions in a master class; I learn something new every time I come back to this opening. I’ll focus on the first two questions in this post: Who is telling the story, and to whom?

Who is telling this story, and what is their deal?

In the 2005 adaptation, Kathy H. is Carey Mulligan.

Well, Kathy H., duh. But who is Kathy H.? For one, Ishiguro lets us know—without ever explaining directly—that Kathy is a caregiver, a public services worker. He does this through Kathy’s use of language, rather than something as straightforward as “I care for X kind of people, in Y kind of institution.” As Rachel Cusk explains,

Ishiguro's ventriloquism announces itself in the novel's first lines: "My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year." The "now'" and the "actually", the absorbed ordinariness, the vagueness of "they" and the precision of "eight months, until the end of this year": Ishiguro's ear is acute, and these are the verbal mannerisms of the public services sector in the humdrum modern world.

More than that, though, we get a deeper sense of Kathy’s psyche through her profession, and the way she talks about her profession and its related institutions. Cusk writes, “Kathy is a ‘carer,’ and indeed the notion of the ‘caring professions’ represents precisely that elision of the institutional and the personal that generates the undertone of disturbance in so much of his work. There are undertones of Kafka, too, in these words, and in the immediate sense they convey of the reader's imprisonment in the narrator, and thus of the narrator's actual powerlessness.”

Throughout this novel, that powerlessness will become a theme. Even though Kathy is the teller of the narrative, her very attempt at narration, down to her choice of language, is shaped by her relations to the institutions in which she has grown up and lives. Alexander Chee (who regularly teaches Never Let Me Go) has said, “[T]he shape of [Kathy’s] mind, shaped by how she’s been raised by the state that intends to consume her, is present in everything from the narration to the tone to the events to her beliefs to her actions, as she tries to escape her fate.” Or as Alix Ohlin recently wrote for the LA Review of Books: Kathy H. “lives a circumscribed existence, so she tells a circumscribed story in a circumscribed way.”

---

To whom, literally and figuratively, is this story being addressed?

Makkai also refers to this concept as “the ear of the story,” or the implied audience, to whom Kathy is telling her story. This audience differs from the actual audience of the book, in other words, you and me. I find that concept so useful (and you should really read and listen to the links there) because from there, as a writer, you can extrapolate so much about how you should be telling the story: you wouldn’t explain concepts that your implied audience already understands, for example.

Kathy has an implied audience, someone to whom she is speaking, and that person is specific. We get clues from the beginning two paragraphs: her use of the word “carer” and “donors,” her knowing reference to “Hailsham or one of the other privileged estates.” Off the bat, I don’t know what those really mean, although I can guess. But Kathy’s implied reader isn’t guessing, although they didn’t attend Hailsham themselves. The implied reader also probably has a reference point for who Ruth and Tommy are; Kathy simply names them, rather than saying, “Ruth, my friend from my childhood, with whom I attended Hailsham.”

Knowing the ear is also super helpful for a story involving a kind of mystery or suspense, as in Never Let Me Go (I imagine, if it’s your first read, you’re thinking: What are donors and carers, and this school feels a bit off, yes?). The implied audience also helps to dictate the rate of revelation, or “the sense we have of the pace at which we’re learning crucial emotional information about the stories’ central figures.”

Speaking of rate of revelation, Ishiguro reveals to us a few more details in the narration fairly quickly that give us a better sense of the implied audience. At the beginning of Chapter Two, Kathy says, “I don’t how it was where you were.” Kathy says at one point. At another: “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” So: Kathy’s implied audience is someone who grew up in similar circumstances to Kathy, someone perhaps equally constrained by the circumstances of her life. And because we are the actual reader, Ishiguro puts us in that circumscribed place, too.

---

A question for you are reading for the first time, what do you think is going on?

If you’re rereading, and you remember that experience, did you already know what was going on?

Next Up: Chapters Five through Nine.

---

Extra Credit Reading

• What I might write about next week for Chapters Five through Nine:

  • Kazuo Ishiguro's Interior Worlds (Asia Society)

  • Introduction by Lydia Davis from her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (pages vii to xx)

  • On Rereading Kazuo Ishiguro by Chris Holmes and Kelly Mee Rich (Modern Fiction Studies) (contains spoilers)

• For reading on critics calling Ishiguro’s narrators “inscrutable,” and how that relates to perceptions of race:

  • The Inscrutable Voices of Asian-Anglophone Fiction by Jane Hu (The New Yorker) (contains spoilers)

  • What's So Inscrutable About Kazuo Ishiguro? by Jo Livingstone (The New Republic) (contains spoilers)

  • Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ Is a Masterpiece of Racial Metaphor by Mimi Wong (Electric Lit) (contains spoilers)

---

---

The Remains of the Schedule

• Week Two (Tuesday, May 20 to Memorial Day Monday, May 26): Chapters Five through Nine, ending at Part Two

• Week Three (Tuesday, May 27 to Monday, June 2): Chapters Ten through Seventeen, ending at Part Three

• Week Four (Tuesday, June 3 to Monday, June 10): Chapters Eighteen through the end