1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
|
'Tis *[sic]* better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
==========================================================================
*in correlation with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go*
There are several points of similarities between Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and Alfred Lord Tennyson's poems in Memoriam. Both the artists share a similar attitude to grave and death. Throughout the novel the author underlines a deep change in human feelings and perceptions about death and how it replaced grief with a ruthless frame of mind towards dealing with the elderly. The poem, written about Arthur Hallam, describes a painful waiting period preceding his death. There are moods of sorrow and anger, but moods of resignation and goodwill prevail, which correspond to the main characters waiting for decay and inevitable death.
In the novel the students have to live, go through training and work because they are clones created for donation. The donor clones were created to supply the one chance for a genetic match to a patient. They were created to be a vessel for someone's hopes and dreams for a cure. But every year the cutting-edge medical technology extends their lives a year longer, although they don't expect to live much past their twenties. In the later half of the novel, the students undergo training at school, do social work with the old, have the chance to travel to countries where they are most needed. But most importantly, they share their feelings with each other - feelings of failure, dread, abandonment, confusion about their place in the scheme of things and their uncertain futures. These feelings and sensitivities all show us a change in the traditional and conservative attitude towards the old and death and the withdrawal and insensitivity we usually observe in society towards grave issues.
Both the novel and the poem provide an impressive tribute to the recently departed and guarantee them a place in eternity. The bond between friends and lovers ties us to those we love and those we mistakenly lose. Whereas the novel deals with the relationship between the donors and the receivers and heightens the tension and emotions around aliveness and inevitability of death to an extreme, complex and culturally **accentuated** way, the poem summarizes several moments of **longing**, doubt, **remorse**, **reproach**, prayer and peace over the unimaginable loss of the deceased. Both the artworks take death as a constant issue to think about rather than conceal or evade.
The two works have a common theme of death and the afterlife, the love and loss. The main characters in both the works are in a state of confusion and uncertainty about their future and do not know what will happen to them.
Vocabulary
----------
* accentuate: accent: emphasize: to make something more prominent or noticeable
* longing: craving: a strong desire especially for something unattainable
* remorse: self-reproach: a gnawing distress arising from a sense of guilt for past wrongs (obsolete: compassion)
* reproach: an expression of rebuke or disapproval, the act or action of reproaching or disapproving
|
