Never Let Me Go Blog Post #3

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

THEME: the insight about human life that is revealed in a literary work

 I think one of the main themes in this book is a theme about sex in societies. Sex plays a major role in the society of Hailsham and on. It's really weird in this book, like, the students are 15 and 16 years old and are concerned about sex with others. They are told at an even earlier age that they can't have babies, which I have yet to discover why. Some of the kids are even excited because then they cant have children. We find out in section two that they are almost clones of another person and I know from Biology that most clones can be infertile due to chromosomal issues and what not. These kids seem perfectly normal, though, so I'm still trying to figure out why exactly they can't have children. The guardians send mixed signals about sex. Kathy remembers them talking about "'respecting their physical needs,' and how sex was 'a very beautiful gift'" (Ishiguro 95). The guardians would also talk about rules dealing with not visiting boys' rooms after nine o'clock and how classrooms, sheds, and pavilions were off limits after dark. So these kids are definitely growing up with a very confused sense of sexuality. It's almost like a game to them and there seems to be a lot less sex going on than what is being inferred. Except when they move to the cottages, there is actually a lot of sex occurring there. They severely frowned upon any sort of gay relations too. These kids are very confused about their sexuality, and don't have sex for the right reasons. I think that we will find out the consequences of this lack of teaching in the area of sex later on in the book.