Sullivan Clare Professor David Never Let Me Go October 15, 2007
One of the biggest problems we face in the battle over cloning are the massive amounts of varying opinions on the issue. People argue passionately for the rights of the sick and disabled to find cures for their diseases. The opponents never consider the issue from any other perspective. They certainly never think of it from the perspective of the people whose body parts might one day be used to help save others. Nor do they consider that in helping victims of illness, they might create a whole new class of victims, victims of health care. In Never Let Me Go cloning is the undertone to almost every conflict in the novel. In the beginning, the student's stories are just like that of any other private school society, but soon, disturbing details begin to leak out. It becomes clear that they are different from the rest of the world. Finally, we realize that the students are clones created to help provide cures for other peoples' diseases. Their fate was decided before they were born. During Friday's group discussion in class, Meredith, Emily, and I were particularly intrigued with the question regarding Tommy classifying Miss Lucy as right, not Miss Emily. Miss Lucy bears the voice of reason throughout the novel. She is the only one who realizes that the web of lies Hailsham have spun are rapidly getting out of control and she can no longer take part. According to Miss Emily, Miss Lucy was a "nice enough but girl", after her time spent with the students of Hailsham, she believed that they needed to be more aware of what lay ahead (267). "She believed you should be given as full a picture as possible. That to do anything less
would be somehow to cheat you. We considered her view and concluded she was mistaken" (267). Miss Lucy was too much of a risk for Hailsham. The other guardians and Madame could not permit Miss Lucy to fill the student's heads with worry and doubt. The students were created to help those in need, and Hailsham wanted to give them the closest thing to a normal childhood as possible. Informing the students about their strenuous futures was unnecessary, it was important that Miss Emily and Madame did what was best for Hailsham in the long run. This book relates to what it means to be human because no matter how one is brought into this world, be it natural birth or through a cloning process, we all attain the same feelings and emotions. Just because Tommy, Kathy, and Ruth were clones, does not mean that they did not suffer the same hardships as those around them. Granted, they differed slightly, yet they still felt the heartaches of lost loves, jealously of those who achieve greater success as cares or donors, and disappointments of knowing that given the opportunity they could have pursued their dreams to becoming successful businessmen and women, actors, and singers. The exact aspirations that Hailsham knew could never come true.