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I half-closed my eyes and imagined that this was the spot where everything I'd lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure on the horizon would appear across the field, and gradually get larger until I could see Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that-I didn't let it-and though the tears rolled down my cheeks, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited for a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off wherever I was supposed to be.
Never Let Me Go, 288
So ends Kathy H.'s narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a novel that follows the lives of several young students who have been cloned for the express purpose of donating their organs to "normal" humans. But if the tears streaming down Kathy's cheeks seem to end her tale on a note of pathos, we must also pause to observe what exactly is causing Kathy's grief. Kathy's tears are not for herself or her impending death. Instead, she weeps for the friends that she has "lost" and the privileged life they once lived, a life that now exists only "in [her] head."1 Kathy refuses to consider that her role as a living, breathing organ farm is a cause for emotional distress and even goes so far as to find comfort in the demands of her job. She braces herself after her emotional outburst, insisting that she was never "out of control," and then calmly drives off to wherever, according to her occupation, she is "supposed to be."
This essay examines the conjunction between affective indifference, vocational proficiency, and quality of life that we see emerging within Never Let Me Go. What is the role of affect with respect to organ transplantation? How and why does Kathy's profession enable her to "control" her affect? And how does the "quality" of one's life become mediated through affective and vocational categories? In order to answer these questions, I will be placing Ishiguro's eccentric Bildungsroman into dialogue with biomedical studies that deal with patients' quality of life. These studies aim to quantify the impact that certain physiological...