Accepting Fate

            During their whole lives, the students of Hailsham understand they do not have a normal future.  They are slowly taught the truth of their lives as they grow up.  By the time they leave Hailsham, the students are quite aware and even content that they are clones of other people, cannot have children, and will donate their organs until they die.  However, a common argument readers have while analyzing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is that the students could try to escape their fate.  The question is, why don’t they?

            One basic answer to this question is that the students were raised in the secluded environment of Hailsham.  They have known nothing other than Hailsham and what Hailsham has taught them.  They are taught from an early age what their duty is in life, and they are given no reason to not believe this.  This is similar to how people in the real world see their life duties.  Most people are raised to believe that their duty is to get a sustainable job, get married, and raise a family.  To the students of Hailsham, they were raised to believe their duty is to donate their organs.  They do not have a reason to believe they should be doing anything else.  In chapter seven, Miss Lucy has an outburst, crying that the student’s “lives are set out” for them and all of their futures have “been decided” (81).  After this incident, though, the students are not concerned with what Miss Lucy said about their limited lives, but with her emotional outburst in general.  The students are so accepting of their fates that they are not fazed when it is laid out before them.

The guardians in the school are the only adults they have in their lives, so for the most part they trust them and believe all they teach.  The guardians also tend to teach important lessons about the students’ futures before the students are mature enough to completely understand them.  For example, the guardians would teach sex at such a young age so they did not truly understand what they were being taught, but just accepted it.  The guardians taught the concepts of carers and donors in the same way.  The students would grow up accepting these concepts as their futures without question.

When asked this question in an interview, Ishiguro claimed that the students don’t run away from their fates because real world people usually don’t either.  It is a common human trait to accept fate and be content with what they are given in life.  In this way, the Hailsham student’s reactions to their fates are not as unrealistic as they initially seem.