Is Kathy an Unreliable Narrator
Kazuo Ishiguro is usually adept at writing books in first-person narration, An Artist of
the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, for instance, are all
completed in first-person narration. Ishiguro’s choice of using first-person narration
presents a more thorough, but meanwhile, subjective passage from Kathy. Unlike thirdperson narration, which is often an objective expression narrated by a person outside the
box, first-person narration allows the narrator to express their feelings and thoughts via
words. Thus, its objectivity and reliability are not guaranteed. According to the Oxford
Dictionary of Literary Terms, the unreliable narrator refers to “A narrator whose account of
events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs
from the ‘true ’understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author.”
( Baldick, 2015, pg.373 ) Based on the big premise of first-person narration, three more
factors further shape Kathy into an unreliable narrator: use of pathetic fallacy, distorted
memory over time, and focalization of Kathy. In this essay, I will provide three pieces of
evidence from the book to demonstrate Kathy’s unreliability as a narrator.
Pathetic fallacy is used frequently in the book, which seriously challenges Kathy’s
reliability. Students in Hailsham, including Kathy, are not technically human, they are
clones. Hence, applying human emotions to them can be seen as a pathetic fallacy, which
is defined by Baldick as “The poetic convention whereby natural phenomena which cannot
feel as humans do are described as if they could.” (2015, pg.270) Pathetic fallacies are
mostly used on an object that doesn’t have human attributes, whereas clones do think and
feel as though they are humans. However, they could never turn into humans because
they are created by advanced technology. Ishiguro endows Kathy with extraordinary
optimism, or to say, exceeding endurance. Kathy knows better than anyone about her
gloomy future of donating organs and completing, but she always tries to conceal her fear
of awaiting fate. Despite depressing situations, she tries hard to face them with an
optimistic attitude. Even until the very end of the book, after the death of Ruth and Tommy,
Kathy stands outside the fence and says “The fantasy never got beyond that — I didn’t let
it — and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just
waited for a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed
to be.” (Ishiguro, 2005, pg.287) It’s still hard to detect despair and hopelessness from her
words, but we see clearness and relief instead. Nonetheless, such a feature of the narrator
also tends to keep readers from the truth, since Kathy’s fear, real thoughts, and feelings
are often hidden somewhere deep beneath the tough, upbeat surface.
Uncertainty and fuzziness of Kathy’s vague memory also play important roles in
Kathy’s unreliability. We notice a great temporal gap between when Kathy recollects her
childhood and when those memories take place. According to Mark Currie, “Memory
failure is a familiar source of unreliability in the first-person narrative voice, and Kathy’s
constant references to previous difficulties of recollection can be thought of as a
subspecies of this kind of unreliability” (Suzuki, 2016) As nearly 20 years had passed after
Kathy’s childhood, it’s impossible to recall every detail accurately and precisely. Kathy
often feels uncertain about when and how long did each event take place. For instance,
when Kathy and Ruth were recalling the “secret guard” business, she claims: “I’m not sure
for how long the “secret guard” business carried on…… My guess is that it went on for
about nine months, a year even, around when we were seven, going on eight.” (Ishiguro,
2005, pg.49) Similar uncertainties like “it might have been a month, maybe longer”
(Ishiguro, 2005, pg.21), “I remember a time when I could only have been five or six.”
(Ishiguro, 2005, pg.31), “I can’t remember exactly what I said to her that night.” (Ishiguro,
2005, Pg.141) also demonstrates the fuzziness of Kathy’s memory. Apart from that,
Kathy’s recollections are not presented in chronological order, they are often discrete and
disconnected. A typical case goes to the discussion about the token’s controversy
between Tommy and Kathy — “Tommy and I discussed the tokens controversy a few
years ago, and we couldn’t at first agree when it had happened. I said we’d been ten at the
time; he thought it was later, but in the end came round to agreeing with me. I’m pretty
sure I got it right: we were in Junior 4 — a while after that incident with Madame, but still
three years before our talk by the pond.” (Ishiguro, 2005, pg.38) Such a means of narrating
disallows Kathy to organize and convey her stories and thoughts in a strictly logical order
and it creates confusion and vagueness for readers. Kathy’s uncertainty about occasion,
duration and detail of her recollections, along with her discrete narrations, convey
misleading and faulty pieces of information. As a result, Kathy’s reliability is greatly
diminished.
Focalization is defined as “the term used in modern narratology for ‘point of view’;
Events observed by a traditional omniscient narrator are said to be non-focalized, whereas
events witnessed within the story’s world from the constrained perspective of a single
character, the focalizer, are ‘internally focalized’” in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary
Terms. (Baldick, 2015, pg.142) Never Let Me Go is certainly internally focalized because
Kathy, undoubtedly, is not at all an omniscient narrator. On the contrary, Kathy herself
wasn’t even aware of the real situation of Hailsham when she was a child, or to say they
were “told and not told” (Ishiguro, 2005, pg.82) Under an environment where guardians
tried to conceal the truth and protect the students, Kathy and her mates only got to know
pieces of information, but never saw the full image. Thus, Kathy’s narration matches
perfectly with the definition of focalization “events witnessed from the constrained
perspective of a single character.” Narration based on constrained perspective is not
reliable because students in Hailsham didn’t have a chance to know their real, depressing
identity and future. Consequently, Kathy could only tell her story as a person inside the
box who could only view the partial image presented in their small world. This distorted the
story and restricted available information for readers.
The use of pathetic fallacy, distorted memory over time, focalization, and other
possible factors have shaped Kathy into an unreliable narrator. We are not able to access
the real story through only what Kathy told and presented to us because of the inaccuracy
and insufficiency of information. However, it’s never to doubt the importance and use of
Kathy’s narration. Same as Kathy, we are also unable to recall every event in our
childhood with absolute accuracy and extreme details, but we also share our stories with
others. Beyond Kathy’s narration, other things she conveys to us — her spirits of optimism
and perseverance, her worldview and thoughts, and her final decision of not to rebel
against the system — are what we should look at and learn from.
Bibliography:
Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Never Let Me Go, New York, Vintage Books
Chris Baldick (2015) Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford, the University of Oxford
Suzuki (2016) Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: Childhood Memories and Nostalgia
Available at: http://katozemi.yokohama/wpcontent/uploads/2017/02/106%EF%BD%9E139%E9%A0%81.pdf
Date Accessed: 2021.11.1
Incredible essay, Charlie! I hope you can maintain this standard and hopefully influence
your peers 