Kazuo Ishiguro and the Legacy of Aspirational Individualism

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go has, within literary scholarship, been primarily framed as a science fiction novel concerned with cloning and genetic questions of ‘the self’. This article offers a new perspective on the novel by analysing the ways in which it is also about the legacy of a particularly Thatcherite notion of aspirational individualism. To this end, I consider the extent to which the stories of the main characters of Ishiguro’s novel – Kathy, Ruth and Tommy – are also stories of unfulfilled ambition. Placing the novel within contemporary debates about aspirational individualism, the article considers how Ishiguro – while critical of Thatcherite ideas of aspiration – nonetheless concedes that a belief in such ideas gives structure, fulfilment and meaning to individual lives.

Loại tài liệu:

Article - Bài báo

Tác giả:

Antony Mullen

Đề mục:

Narrative

Nhà xuất bản:

Open Library of Humanities

Ngày xuất bản:

2019

Số trang/ tờ:

Định dạng:

pdf

Định danh tư liệu:

https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.556

Nguồn gốc:

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings; Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 2019, Pages 1-14

Liên kết:

ISSN 2045-5224

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