Keeping track of humanness in the novel never let me go: why telling matters

As Arendt puts it ‘without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart.a In the novel Never Let Me Go, by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro, we are faced with the question of what it means to be human in a brave new world of clones and their makers, where the promise to be oneself can only be taken by the non-cloned human beings living in a society ruled by the myth of perfection interpreted as the myth of immortality. The problem with this myth is that death can only be deferred, not erased and the nature of utopia is to last while the gap between the ideal and reality is kept. Once this gap is overcome, utopia disappears. As Habermas warns in his book The Future of Human Nature, genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species and the brave new world of Never Let Me Go makes the reader see what it means to change human condition. The plot underlines three important conditions of humanness: memory, empathy and the ability and willingness to tell one’s own story to the Other. This essay aims at understanding what cloning is, including ethical issues of biotechnology and the role of narrative in our quest for the heart of human nature.