Time creates an often linear line by which all human beings can measure and divide their lives. People use time to predict milestones like an infant taking its first steps or a child graduatinig middleschool. People also use time to reflect on devisions of thier lives. When I remember things, I think back on my life as I divide it into preschool, elementary school, middleschool, and currently highschool. Within each of these, I recall certain grades. I am able to remember how I acted in each grade, as if I were remembering each different person I was compared to the one I became.
In Never Let Me Go, the plot is driven by the concept of reflecting through time. Kathy, the narrator, begins her story at point 1 in the diagram below, the present day.
Kathy precedes to describe her current life, though the reader has no background to comprehend what is being said. Then, Kathy takes the reader back to her youngest years at Hailsham (2), where her earliest memories include the peculiar treatment toward all students. They were encouraged to be creative, but the reader immediately recognises that these young children have no parents and no deep connections with the adults in thier lives. The children are independent, though they have unstable identities. The plot then returns to the present day as Kathy objectively describes her friends, Ruth and Tommy.
The plot then jumps back from 1 to 3, when she lived in the "cottages" with older Hailsham students. You learn that they are infertile clones, and that they must donate their organs for use of the public health system. The students form theories about how to escape this fate, and retain their hopes. Kathy continues to struggle with her identity due to manipulative behaviors from the other students. Students like Ruth were driven to manipulate others because they are afraid. Before this section of the story ends, Kathy transitions to the present day(1).
From here, she moves forward to reach closures. This book follows a unique timeline that causes the readers to enter the story just like the children, knowing nothing. The reader finds out about the purpose of Hailsham as the characters do, but the reader has extra background of knowing what a normal life is like. The reader can feel rage at the differences in treatment, lack of escape, and purpose. The characters in the book lack this response because they know of nothing else.
This book skips around through time, but time itself provides a line through which the plot can derive some unity.
The way Kathy narated the story both confused and entertained me.
ReplyDeleteAt points within the novel she would jump around to different periods of time in her childhood to explain an experience that related to the topic of the chapter, only to come back to it in an entirely different chapter when I had pretty much placed that scene or character in the back of my mind, pretty sure I wouldn't need it at any other point, leaving me in the end confused and somewhat annoyed.
I did, however, enjoy how she narated from a point in the future, giving her the chance to both descibe what had occured in each event, and then reflect on those moments with a new outlook. When I read a novel or story, I often find that the narator is living in the moment and doesn't take any other perspected but that one, leaving me with no thoughts and other outlook on the situation but hers/his.
I personally really enjoyed the way that the author chose to tell the story; this really kept the reader actively involved in the story. As the book went on, I would learn new things just as the children were finding out too.
DeleteI agree, that is a really good point that you made about the point of view. The narrator seems to only tell the story through her perspective, not taking others into consideration, so the story could be extremely biased. In that way the storyline does bug me a little, I find myself irrationally judging other characters based on Kathy's perceptions.