Cohesion, Exile, Return: Non-Human Narrative and the Shape of Diaspora Community in Never Let Me Go

This article argues that Never Let Me Go employs non-human narrative to depict the clones’ brief life journeys, thereby sketching how a plural diaspora community takes shape. Departing from studies that confine diasporic subjecthood to humans, it situates diaspora theory within the clones’ experience of cohesion, exile, and return, and examines the different forms of community emerging from this process. The Hailsham homeland community, composed of clones under human governance, foregrounds its internal complexity and the dual instability of homeland and identity. After graduating from Hailsham, the clones move into a condition of exile in which a memory community begins to form, as a process of fragmentation and consolidation forges emotional bonds and sustains beliefs among diasporic subjects. Through the spatial image of the Norfolk fields as a “non-place,” Kathy undertakes an imaginative return to community and reconstructs a spiritual homeland after the loss of her close companions and childhood home. This article shows that, on the one hand, Kazuo Ishiguro articulates a plural and inclusive vision of diasporic identity, and, on the other, uses non-human narrative to map the possibilities for imagining community as a reparative response to vulnerability.