石黑一雄《别让我走》中的克隆人身份研究

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摘 要

身份问题研究是文学研究中非常重要的一部分，身份问题的研究既能够为人们提供一个自我认知的角度，更是文学研究中极其重要的方法和路径。作为“移民三雄”之一的石黑一雄，其复杂的身份使之受到国内外学者的广泛关注。目前关于《别让我走》的研究大致分为叙事研究、伦理研究以及身份研究等。其中身份研究多侧重于身份建构，但少有从后殖民角度分析身份问题的研究。本文从后殖民角度出发，借用其中殖民者与被殖民者之间的关系来分析小说中克隆人的身份以及克隆人与学校“黑尔舍姆”之间的复杂关系。希望本文可以为《别让我走》的身份问题研究提供一个新的研究思路。

关键词：石黑一雄；《别让我走》；身份研究；后殖民主义；克隆人

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

English Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Introduction 1

Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go 1

Literature Review 2

Homi K. Bhabha and his Post-colonial Theory 3

Thesis Statement and Structure 4

Chapter One: The Hybrid Identity of Clone 6

1.1The Carer of Finding a Chance of Survival 6

1.2The Donor of Accepting Fate 7

Chapter Two: The Imitation of Clone to Human 9

2.1The Imitation of Art 9

2.2The Imitation of Love 10

Chapter Three: The “Other” and “Self” 13

3.1The “Self” with Dominance 13

3.2The Domesticated “Other” 14

Conclusion 17

Works Cited 18

Introduction

Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro, a well-known British writer, was born in Nagasaki, Japan, 1954. However, during his most important growing period, he left his hometown and moved to Britain with his family, so Ishiguro was influenced by both British and Japanese cultures. On the one hand, the English education he accepted allowed him to write accurately and fluently in English, and the norms and appropriateness of his language showed a high level of his language attainment. On the other hand, he was still influenced by Japanese culture at home. His parents never gave up the traditional Japanese education of him. Growing up in such a dual cultural contexts, Kazuo Ishiguro began to devote himself into literary creation in the 1980s and then became popular in English literary arena. His main works include A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day. As one of the three famous emigrant writers in British literature, Kazuo Ishiguro has been widely studied by scholars at home and abroad.

Kazuo Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go in 2005. The background of the novel is a school “Hailsham” that trains clones in the 1990’s Britain, and young boys and girls pursuing their identities. Thanks to this novel, Ishiguro get nomination of The Booker Prize at a second time. The novel is told by the protagonist, Kathy. She is a gentle and calm “carer”, who cares not for ordinary patients, but for her compatriots who are called “donor” in the novel. These donors are actually clones made by humans, in order to prolong the latter’s lives. They grow up in a boarding school Hailsham, and live in a kind of isolated life under the careful care of “guardians” (Ishiguro, 17). School pays much attention to students’ health, such as smoking, which is harmful to the body, is absolutely prohibited; on the contrary, Hailsham has a rare and open policy on sex education. After leaving away from the school, the clones need to live in the “cottage” (14) for the transition from childhood to adulthood, and then enter into social life, waiting for organ donation. During this time, some of them become “carers” to care for those who have experienced donation several times. It is the fate that they can’t escape. As long as people need it, these clones have to donate their organs again and again until the end of their lives. Faced with their doomed and unequal arrangements from management, the clones domesticated by Hailsham from an early age can not escape, even without thinking about escaping.

Literature Review

In Never Let Me Go, the protagonist Kathy, as a clone, tries to change her as well as other clones’ fate, but the way she finds can not change the fate, so she has to choose to accept her clone and donor identity, and finally died of organ donation. It is precisely because of the special identity of the protagonist that many scholars have carried out research on her identity.

In Alun Hughes’s article “Belonging in the Hyperreal: A Postmodern Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, he analyzes this novel from a post-modern perspective. When discussing the identity of the protagonist, he believes that the identity of the protagonist is determined by the existence of the school “Hailsham” (5). It is precisely because of the existence of the “subject” Hailsham that makes the “object” protagonist emerge. Meanwhile, Yunbo Zhi and Yang Zhang also discusses the identity construction of this novel. In their studies “An Interpretation of the Identity Construction of Never Let Me Go in the Context of Post-Humanity” they discuss the identity construction of protagonist in the context of post-humanity. The study shows that the appearance of cloned human identity marks that “anthropocentrism” is no longer in line with the requirements of the times (56). This article lists the behaviors of human cloning, which shows that human cloning has its own social attributes, and the central position of human begins to decline slowly. In Rachel Carroll’s article “Limitations of Life: Cloning, Heterosexuality and the Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, he argued that the identity of human cloning can evoke emotional resonance about ethics and morality (3). The clones in the novel are the “object” for organ donation, but their emotions are as real as human beings, which will generate people’s sympathy for human cloning. In “The Othering in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Matava Vichiensing, taking the “other” in post-colonialism as a cutting point, demonstrates that the existence of the protagonists and other clones, these “others” in Hailsham may have many adverse effects on society. He believes that as the marginalized others, there may be more clones like the protagonists looking for ways to change their fate, and the methods they adopt are likely to have an impact on the stability of the whole society (6).

In a word, identity is a very important element of Never Let Me Go. Although many scholars at home and abroad have studied the identity of the protagonist, and some scholars like Matava Vichiensing have studied the identity of the clones from the perspective of post-colonialism, the method they used is relatively single. From the perspective of post-colonialism, readers can not only have a deeper understanding of the novel itself, but also reveal the impact of post-colonialism on the real society. The perspective of post-colonialism can make readers aware of the identity construction of people under post-colonialism, understand the impact of post-colonialism on identity construction, and provide a new way of thinking for the future study of this novel. Therefore, based on the perspective of post-colonialism, this paper will analyse the identity of the protagonist in the novel and the relationship between the protagonist and “Hailsham” and its influence.

Homi K. Bhabha and his Post-colonial Theory

Taking Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as the text, and based on Homi K. Bhabha’ s post-colonial theory, this paper will study especially the theory of “identity”, “mimicry”, “self” and “other”, to study the protagonist’s identity and the relationship between the protagonist and the school “Hailsham”, and draw the conclusion that what kind of impact the school makes on the protagonist’s identity. Homi K. BhaBha is one of the most important post-colonial theorist. He combines post-structuralism with Marxism, developing a challenging and deconstructive style of post-colonial cultural criticism. His hybridity theory has influenced the current international academic research on identity and ethnic minorities, and puts forward specific strategies for the third world’s critics to voice their voices. His mimicry concept is counter-productive to the third world critics. It has great enlightenment to the efforts of opposing the Western cultural hegemony. A cultural translation theory developed by him has strongly impacted the language-centered model in the field of translation studies.

Bhabha’s theories are useful when we analyze the the identity issues in this novel. His hybridity and mimicry theory can easily explain the protagonist and other clones’ behavior. In the final part, the protagonist, Kathy, accepts her clone identity and the fate that dying of organ donation, which can also be understand by whose deconstructive thought. The binary opposition structure which he mentioned in The Location of Culture is also important when discussed the relationship between school Hailsham and the clones.

Thesis Statement and Structure

Through an examination of Never Let Me Go, this thesis argues that, the protagonists and other students in Hailsham are like the colonized ones, even if the mimicry and hybridity make them search for ways to change the status quo, they can hardly escape the shackles of the colonized identity and the colonists’ cultural and ideological indoctrination on them.

Chapter One of this thesis focuses on protagonist’s different and hybrid identities, especially on “carer” and “donor”, these two identities, and the impact of these different and mixed identities on protagonist Kathy’s behavior will be analyzed. It will get the conclusion that these hybrid identities drive the protagonist to find out a way to change herself and other clones’ fate, moreover, this hybridity brings agency, and the agency makes the protagonist decide to change her and other clones’ fate.

Chapter Two of this thesis discusses protagonist and other clones’ mimicry. This part mainly focuses on clones’ imitation of art and love of people. The conclusion of this chapter is the imitation shows that the clones are not only a kind of “object”, which means they are not only used for organ donation, they are also like the real people. It will arouse people’s reflection on clones’ identity. What’s more, because the mimicry, the clones’ identity has been changed. It makes their identity hybrid, and the hybridity brings change.

Chapter Three explores the identity of school Hailsham and clones, the relationship between Hailsham and clones’ identity, and the influence of this relationship on the clones’ action and fate. The school Hailsham, as the constructor, has the dominant power of discourse. It uses its power to make thought and culture irrigation on the clones. Under this irrigation, the constructed clones are difficult to change their mind and fate.

In the conclusion part, it is emphasized that the mimicry and the hybridty make changes possible. As a carer for other donors, she has always been a donor of organs to be donated. As a clone for organ donation, she is also a social animal with thoughts and feelings like human beings. It is this mixed identity that makes it possible for the protagonist to change the fate of himself and his fellow clones. However, because of the colonizers or constructors’ culture irrigation, even if the constructed person will change the status quo because of his mixed identity, the clones are hard to change their fate.

Chapter One: The Hybrid Identity of Clone

As the protagonist of Never Let Me Go, Kathy has many identities. As a clone, she is one of the clones of organ donation who grow up in Hailsham; she becomes a carer after leaving Hailsham in order to find a way to change her life. After several attempts without result, and desperately seeing her friends die of organ donations, Kathy finally accepts her fate and becomes a donor. In addition, Kathy and her classmates are not only the clones for organ donation, but also social animals with the same emotional and thinking abilities as humans (Liu 3). More importantly, these identities of Kathy do not exist alone in a certain period of time. In most periods, some of these identities are existing simultaneously, which makes the identity of the protagonist Kathy hybrid. This chapter focuses on the analysis of Kathy’s identities in the “carer” and “donor” periods, and inquires into the impact of her hybrid identity.

1.1The Carer of Finding a Chance of Survival

As a student of Hailsham, after leaving school, he will be assigned to different places where he can spend two or three years of relatively free time. He then will be sent to different hospitals, ready to donate their organs until they die. Because Kathy’s friends and loved ones fall in love with each other, she feels embarrassed when facing her friends, and at the same time she hears that if she becomes a carer, she can delay the organ donation, so Kathy choose to leave her friends and become a carer (Ishiguro,169). During the period of the carer time, she has been looking for ways to avoid organ donation—to save herself and other clones’ lives. From post-colonial point of view, the protagonist wants to get rid of her status as a colonized person and to move closer to the position of the colonists, and eventually becomes something like the “agent” that is appointed by the colonists in the colonies. At the time, the protagonist is not only a potential donor to donate organs, but also a carer to take care of other donors. This hybrid identity makes the protagonist’ sense of resistance emerge, so that she begins to use her own way to get rid of the status as the colonized. In the novel, the protagonist, through her own observations and what she see and hear during the carer period, combines them with her own analysis, then finally draws the conclusion that organ donation can be avoided as long as she can prove her love with loved ones, and prove that both of them love with each other. It is precisely because of her special and mixed identity that the protagonist has the opportunity to look at the clones and herself from different perspectives and to have more access to get more information. Driven by these conditions, Kathy makes the choice of seeking life and changing fate not only for herself, but also for all the clones that Hailsham has bred.

1.2The Donor of Accepting Fate

After finding a way to avoid organ donation, that is, she can prove to Hailsham’s administrators that she loves with her school sweetheart, and both of them love with each other, Kathy and Tommy go to their administrators’ home and find their former guardians, show them their works of art with great enthusiasm, and making an analysis of the ways to avoid organ donation (Ishiguro, 256). However, they are told that this method is only a kind of rumor, and their identity as clones has been with them since they are born. It’s doomed at the beginning, and it can’t be changed (258). Kathy and Tommy, these two frustrated people leave away from the former administrator’s home, and decide to spend their last days together. Finally, Kathy accompanies Tommy to make his last donation, and her carer status will be over soon. She will die as a donor, just as her compatriot in Hailsham, die for organ donation (264). It is not difficult to see that as a clone, Kathy want to try her best to gain rights for herself and the other human cloning, but her method could not change their fate in the end. Miscellaneous identity drives Kathy to find a way to change clones’ fate and lives. Hybrid identity makes this kind of action possible. However, because of the influence of Hailsham’s ideological and cultural education, the way she finds is doomed to fail to save herself and the other clones. The method she finds is easily denied by managers in the final part, which shows that Hailsham has absolute right of discourse. Under this circumstance, almost every request by the clones will be ignored. Although the managers realize that the students in the school are not just clones for organ donation, Hailsham’s ideological and cultural indoctrination of each clone is like a branding in their minds, keeping their thought from jumping out the fetter of the school. Therefore, Kathy and her compatriots finally do not get rid of Hailsham’s control over them and choose to accept the fate formulated by Hailsham.

Bhabha believes that colonists’ domination and oppression of the colonized is not only a one-way operation of power, but in fact the relationship between them is intertwined and difficult to strictly demarcate and distinguish (249). Colonized people imitate colonial discourse with different repetitions, which makes their identities impure and further deconstruct and subvert colonial discourse. Bhabha also attaches great importance to the agency of the colonized. He believes that only a mixed state can make the agency possible (271). It is because of Kathy’s mixed identity that she can feel more about others and her feelings as a donor when she is a carer, and finally she wants to find ways to change the fate of herself and other clones. Although the ultimate method can not change their fate because of the influence of Hailsham, it can not be denied that the mixed identity of the hero makes this initiative change possible.

Chapter Two: The Imitation of Clone to Human

Mimicry is a vivid description of the relationship between the colonists and the colonized people. The colonized people imitate the behavior, thought and culture of the colonists, and integrate their own characteristics to make them mixed and hybrid, so as to break the dominant position of the colonizers and their dominant identity (Carroll,3). As an important point of post-colonial theory, it has been implied in the novel. From the imitation and creation of art by the students in the school Hailsham at the beginning part of the novel, to the protagonist and her friends’ imitation of human behavior and human’s love in the later part, this kind of imitations, which is not a complete imitation of the constructor, shows the protagonist’s quest for her own identity and her desire to change her identity and destiny, and has a tremendous impact on the protagonist’s identity shaping.

2.1The Imitation of Art

As a student of Hailsham, the protagonist needs to learn a lot of cultural courses in the school, including art, literature, music, sports and other courses. For human beings, most of them can only learn these courses at higher stages. Taking art as an example, art is an unique activity of human beings to express their own thoughts, while the students in Hailsham seem to be very creative and artistic. Kathy is addicted to Judy Bridgewater’s music “Never Let Me Go” (Ishiguro,69), Christie can write a good poem, and there are also many students’ paintings, pottery and sketches at the fair, allowing others to choose and buy (53). Hailsham stipulates that excellent paintings can enter the “Lady’s Gallery”, so clones in the novel all have an extraordinary passion for painting, because for them, this is the supreme honor. From these we can see that the clones in this novel are seriously treating art. They treat art not only simply by imitating human beings to create, but also with a sense of competition and vanity. And for them at that time, entering the “Lady’s Gallery” means that they may have the opportunity to change their destiny and avoid organ donation. Although it is just a rumor, and no one knows the concrete way, it’s still like a life-saving straw for the students. The rumor makes the students mix different kinds of ideas into their paintings and makes their thought hybrid when they are painting. This kind of imitation makes it possible for students to start to think who they are, and what identities they have. The imitation also makes students to have mixed identities and the idea of “wanting to change their destiny” being possible.

2.2The Imitation of Love

If the mimicry of art is the key step to determine the identity of human cloning, then the mimicry of thoughts and emotions of human cloning is a further manifestation of their identity. Blaise Pascal says in his article “Man is a reed that thinks”: “Man can think, and all our dignity lies in thought” (170). Cloned human beings in this article have the same rich emotions as human beings, Kathy’s calmness, Ruth’s frankness, Tommy’s loyalty, they all have unique personalities and emotions. And their friendship and love seem to be the same as human beings. They are not only cloned human beings, a kind of objects for organ donation, but also “humanized individuals” (Mu, 82) and social animals. Kathy flips through pornographic magazines, not entirely because her curiosity or in order to satisfy her desires as human beings, she is also seeking for her own prototype in magazines. Kathy and Tommy love each other, just like human beings’ love, but it is not entirely human-like. For them, if they can prove that their love is existing, their lives can be extended, even their destiny can be changed— the organ donation may be avoided. This imitation further shows the mixed identity of the cloned person in the novel. The love which contains both human’s thought and clones’ thought makes the identity of the protagonist hybrid, and this hybrid inspires the idea of changing her destiny.

The reason why the mimicry happened is because of the consciousness of losing organ and the constructors’ attitude. “Clone narratives usually play on our anxiety over the uncanny, the discomfort we feel when the leitmotif of the ‘double’, ‘copy’ and ‘simulacra’ arouse strangeness, a crisis of one’s individuality and identification, and a disturbance of subjectivity and objectivity” (Guo, 3). Since Miss Lucy said “You’ve been told and not told” (Ishiguro, 79), some of the clones, mind has been changed. Before they are old enough to know and understand what all this sentence means, the only thing they need to bear in their mind is they need to and have to donate their vital organs after the adolescence. However, Kathy and her friends, Tommy and Ruth, start to find who they really are because of their inner fear and worry of losing organ. What’s more, taught from childhood to understand their differences as categorical and as residing in their inability to reproduce, they are subject to the irrational prejudices of others; even those dedicated to their care struggle to conceal their revulsion, as a former guardian confesses: “Is she afraid of you? We’re all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you almost every Day” (264). Tommy is good at soccer, but he is not good at art. He tells Kathy the reaction of Miss Lucy on his lack of creativity: Miss Lucy does not blame him; instead of that, she says it will be all right and “nothing wrong with it” (23). What makes him even more surprised is that Miss Lucy reacts as if something was wrong indeed with herself. He describes the uncanny moment when she was “shaking. With rage. I could see her. She was furious. But furious deep inside” (28). Madame is afraid of them too, but she is afraid of them “in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders” (35). Kathy is scared of her creepy look, and she is confused to her own identity. Now she is a stranger to other people, “It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange” (36). The sense of her self becomes doubtful, because the familiar “herself” has been changed in the others’ eyes. “I am another thing”, this fact is confirmed by the others. Through the eyes of Madame and Miss Lucy, Kathy glimpses herself.

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha shows the difference between mimesis and mimicry: “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation... Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents” (125). Mimesis is the faithful replication of the imitator to the imitated, but the aim of mimicry is to produce some kind of “other” between the similarity and dissimilarity. From the perspective of post-colonialism, the conquered are forced to simulate colonial discourse constantly after being colonized, and in the process of simulation, they are constantly transformed from the inside. In the colonial consciousness, they find and tear cracks, break the binary opposition between themselves and the colonizers, create ambiguity and hybridity, and create “the third space” to resist the essentialism and hegemony of Western culture and its dominance of discourse (Bhabha, 152).

Mimicry has important significance to post-colonial writing. Because the importance of mimicry does not lie in intentional confrontation, but in its inherent splitting and decomposition function (Bhabha, 131). This kind of colonial simulation of its colonizers is just a kind of “excess” in the sense of Derrida’s deconstructionism. This excess disrupts the norm and order of the stability of colonial discourse or cultural hegemony, destroys its complete meaning, and it is not a deliberate act of mimicry, but a natural potential threat in it. It is precisely because Kathy’s imitation of people’s action, art and emotion, the hybrid identity of the protagonist, her cloning and “human-like” identity has appeared. Because the protagonist’s continuous simulation of human’s exterior and interior, the hybridity appearances constantly, then makes the protagonist come out the idea of trying to change her fate and that of other cloned human beings.

Chapter Three: The “Other” and “Self”

When it comes to identity in post-colonial theory, it inevitably involves the relationship between “subject” and “object”, “self” and “other”. The construction of cultural identity is always closely related to the constructor “I” and the constructed “He”. The relationship between the constructor school “Hailsham” and the constructed “human cloning” is not just one-way oppression and indoctrination. The hero Kathy’s pursuit of changing fate also compels managers to think about whether the identity of human cloning is just a tool for organ donation, which they defined for a very long time. This binary opposition has a great impact on Kathy and other clones’ identity construction and their ultimate fate.

3.1The “Self” with Dominance

The Hailsham School in the novel is the “self”. It has the right of discourse and the power of dominance. Hailsham is the epitome of all human beings in the world. It has led and promoted the production of human cloning and the organ donation program. Through ideological and cultural education, the clones in Hailsham think donating organ is their inherent mission and destiny. In the novel, Miss Lucy, a guardian who is somewhat different from other guardians, can’t stand the cruel reality that happens in the school Hailsham, so she says something to the students, in order to arouse them. However, as she says to the protagonist and other students in the gym, “You’re told and not really told... If you want to live a decent life, each of you must understand who you are and what’s in front of you” (79). Most students don’t fully understand what Lucy says. They think that donating organs is something that everyone knows will happen on every student in Hailsham. They know it long time ago, it’s what they should do, and they don’t need to be explained again. This makes it surprisingly rare to discuss what she said later. If this is mentioned, people will say: “So what? We have already known everything” (79). It is precisely because of the ideological and cultural indoctrination of Hailsham that the clones accept the fate imposed on them by Hailsham in an imperceptible way. And soon after Miss Lucy did this, she leaves school. Although the reason why she leaves school is not clear by Kathy’s perspective, it can be guessed that she is persuaded to resign from her job. Because Hailsham is the dominant constructor, it can deal with the inner “agents” who have different voices, so as to further stabilizes its dominant position, and continue ideological and cultural education of the constructed, so that the identity of “other” can not be changed. Thus they can realize the long-term oppression and plunder of the constructed.

History is one of the most important part in constructing culture. “The man who appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is dehistoricized” (Foucault, 369). In the same period, the dehistoricized authority of “man and his doubles” produces those forces of normalization and naturalization that create a modern Western disciplinary society.(Bhabha, 282) This invisible power is gained at the cost of the “others”, for example, women, the colonized and enslaved, who were becoming the people without a history in other spaces. In the novel, the clones are the people who don’t have a history. They has been told to do organ donation since they are born. For them, having no history and staying in Hailsham since they are born means they don’t have their own culture. Therefore, Hailsham can easily instill the culture and thought it wants to give them, and they can hardly realize their identity and position and escape from the culture irrigation.

3.2The Domesticated “Other”

The donors who can not escape their own destiny in the novel are the “other”, who are excluded from human’s mind and ethics. At the beginning, the birth of human cloning which symbolizes the progress of human science, is an experimental “achievement” (Song and Guo, 93). Human beings do not require to regard these clones as the same level of life. Human beings educate and domesticate them, and then the clones become the objects of their slaughter. Under Hailsham’s cultural and mental teaching, they have internalized and self-reinforced the service consciousness and power discourse disseminated by Hailsham, and have even forgot their pain and despair as the “other”. As Foucault says, “a fictional relationship automatically produces a real conquest” (271). By means of the school, human beings use their power to cultivate meek and healthy clones to satisfy their greedy need for life. The clones are disciplined as donating organs is a natural and noble duty. The education that Kathy and other clones accept is unfair and is the ideological way of human colonial rulers to control them. According to Kathy, they have been taught good knowledge, any negative or health-affecting knowledge is shielded by the school, such education can not develop their ability to fully understand their social status (Ishiguro, 84). They are educated as colonists did in their colonies to ensure that the colonized people are subordinated to them. The cloning of human beings in the novel are firmly controlled by the imperfect education of the colonizer Hailsham, which has already determined their fate. In the process of colonization, there is a relationship between the simulated and the simulating. The clones in the novel are like colonized people. They imitate human’s speeches, behavior, and emotions. Although they try their best to imitate the colonizers, they can’t break with the identity of human clones. Although their hybrid identities are noticed by the constructors, they are quickly buried by interests and needs. They seem to be needed by the mainstream society, but in fact, they can not cross the gap between the “other” and the morbid demand-supply relationship. Since they are born, their fate is doomed to tragedy.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are compelled to “pass” in the world of “normal”. However, strategies of assimilation cannot enable them to escape a fundamental condition of their existence: the denial of their right to agency and self-determination on the grounds of their status as less than human (Carroll, 131). If the protagonist Kathy is regarded as the colonized or constructed one, it can be attributed to her special clone identity. The clones in the novel are products, which are made by the human beings, and by the school Hailsham’s education of culture and thought, and they become objectification and accept the objectification and indoctrination. “Indoctrination is intended to influence targets to believe in what they are told without questioning the veracity or authenticity of the conveyed information” (Ioana and Cracsner, 561). People can be instilled by the religious, military context and political, especially by education. In the novel, the indoctrination process usually occurs in Hailsham when the madame and the other guardians want to infuse beliefs or ideas to persuade the clones to accept the donation.

In fact, the study of the relationship between the “self” and the “other” is a kind of social criticism, political criticism and ideological criticism through cultural studies, which can deconstruct and dispel some established concepts and prejudices in western capitalist society (Bhabha, 96). The relationship between Hailsham and human cloning presented in this novel will make people wonder whether the identity of human cloning group is the result of experiments, the object of arbitrary disposal, and the object for organ donation, which are propagated by the media in peacetime. They also have emotional, ideological and social attributes like human beings. They imitate human beings while adding their own understanding and purpose. Because of the hybrid identity they begin to find ways to change their fate. Although the hero in the novel finally fails, her hybrid identity is deeply engraved in the hearts of every reader. Changing people’s perception of the identity of clones is one of the ideas Ishiguro wants to convey to readers.

Homi Bhabha asserts that the “other” can also influence and change the “self”. This change is not only in discourse, but also in culture and value judgement (103). In Never Let Me Go, human beings finally bear a sense of moral guilt; and in the process of human cloning to establish human-liked identity, there is also a contradiction between self-awakening and the disobeyed fate. They hardly voices resistance, even after the collapse of Hailsham. They have always believed that the “beautiful lies”— “proving true love” could delay or escape from organ donation. Lovers Kathy and Tommy try their best to find “Madame”, in order to use their love to get permission to postpone donation time, but when they learn that it is only a rumor, human beings are obviously an ignoble existence; and when they solve all the puzzles that plague them for years from Miss Emily, such as who they are, where they come from, and why they exist. While waiting for them is the irresistible fate of inevitable death (Zhi and Zhang, 57). On the way back to the rehabilitation center, Tommy waves his fist in the dark mud, screams loudly and curses incoherently. Only venting to nature, no one will listen (Ishiguro, 252). Although the constructors know these clones are no longer the objects of organ donation, they will ignore the discourse of them because of the interests. The relationship between the colonized and the colonizer is difficult to change, the fate and identity of the clones are hard to change, either.

Conclusion

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