“Look in the Gutter”: Infrastructural Interiority in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This article reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as an experiment in sentient infrastructure. Narrated by Kathy H., the subject of a government cloning program, her infrastructural interiority is characterized not only by its limited style but also by its attention to the immediate material environment. While the main problem of the novel is how to understand the clone’s personhood, Ishiguro dramatizes this through a spatial vocabulary, especially the difference between Hailsham, the privileged estate where Kathy grew up, and the rest of the program’s facilities. The novel can thus be read as deliberating over infrastructure’s signifying ability, both its potential and desirability.

Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 2015) || https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2015.0054