"What We're Supposed To Be Doing": Ideology and Structural Injustice in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Abstract: This essay examines the difficulties inherent in recognizing and contesting structural injustice via an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel Never Let Me Go . I argue that the novel is a sophisticated meditation on the role of ideology in sustaining the reproduction of structural injustice. By presenting a world in which those who stand to suffer from grossly unjust sociopolitical arrangements simply do not contemplate the possibility of resistance, Ishiguro offers a troubling portrait of the human tendency to accept oppressive systems as "normal." The characters who inhabit the novel's world do not share the reader's horror; and where political activism does exist, it is a feeble reformism that merely promotes a new and improved version of the status quo. In our own era, the interconnected injustices posed by global climate collapse, militarized borders, genocide, endemic racism, and unfettered neoliberal capitalism bear a striking resemblance to Ishiguro's world. The question is: has wholesale political transformation become similarly unthinkable for us because we fail to recognize the problems?