Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia and Bio-politics in Never Let Me Go

초록

In this paper, I critically analyze Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a non-conventional science fiction with a backdrop of past, contemporary and future England. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go deconstructs the genre conventions of science fiction and expands its horizon to philosophical considerations of humanity and the ontological meaning of truth and freedom by using the dialectics of utopia and dystopia. It also regards the clone as a metaphor of potential humanity and debates its historical meaning. To substantialize argument and analysis, I employ Giorgio Agamben’s ethico-ontology as well as his critique on contemporary bio-politics. Viewing through this lens, I first explore how the narrative in the novel contradicts readers’ logical assumptions by turning Kathy, the clone narrator and protagonist, into an unreliable narrator. Next, I relate this contradiction to the chronotope of the novel, which is critically detached from and simultaneously eclipses the actual space and time. The chronotope embeds dialectics of utopia and dystopia via fictional mediation to illuminate the actual world. In turn, I argue that the novel critiques a hidden apparatus, so-called anthropological machine and its bio-political function to exclude non-humanity that results in massive violence against minorities in the actual history. In the end, this paper explore the meaning of Kathy’s ultimately ethical, existential choice that unfolds a true meaning of testimony.

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