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Summary Never Let Me Go: Language, Structure and Context
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Never Let Me Go: Language, Structure and Context
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LanguageVerisimilitude (the appearance of being true) - the writing style is very colloquial.
Hailsham is a synecdoche (a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa) for cloning.
Madame can be argued to be a synecdoche for how the rest of society sees the clones- ‘We’re
all afraid of you’ Chapter 22
Irony of the characters thinking Hailsham is the safest place to be – The ‘safest was the front
of the main house’ Chapter 5
Diatribe (a forceful and bitter attack against something or someone) - In Chapter 14 Ruth
breaks down and states ‘we’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps.’
The cloning system is an allegory for systematic oppression, and how some people in society
are kept out of integrating.
Symbolism- The Judy Bridgewater tape symbolises how Kathy can’t move on from her
memories, even though things will never be the same. Her driving symbolises her
confinement. Unlike her childhood, she can go wherever at any time, but she’s always alone
and always going where she’s told.
Animal Imagery- There's Tommy’s elephant as a child, and more complex drawings when
he gets older. Kathy compares herself and her friends to spiders in Chapter 3. The cottages
have an old barn, but we never see any real animals. It’s a reminder that the clones are being
treated like animals, but also that they’re creative, and do have souls. By both of these things
being conveyed by one type of imagery, the reader is forced to confront the dystopian reality.
Water Imagery- There's Tommy's childhood fantasy that he was splish-splashing through
water after making a football goal, the art gallery in Norfolk, which is filled with sea-themed
paintings, Ruth's dream that she was at Hailsham and the grounds were flooded and Tommy's
image of two people in a river, trying to hold onto one another despite the strong current.
There’s also the stranded boat, with no water. This could be said to symbolise how things
(like scientific development) can be both good and necessary, and also bad.
Intertextual References- There's references to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (Chapter 10),
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Chapter 10), Homer's Odyssey (Chapter 20), and One
Thousand and One Nights (Chapter 10). Shows the clones can apricate art, and grounds the
story in our world.
Parenthetical Clause (a phrase that is not essential to the rest of the sentence) – ‘That sounds
long enough, I know, but they actually want me to go on for another eight months, until the
end of the year.’ Adds to the verisimilitude.
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