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Teaching Never Let Me Go as a Novel on Empathy and Education

This essay introduces practical pedagogical ways in which Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can be read and taught as a novel on empathy and education, rather than a scientific novel on clones. In my previous teaching experiences in English literature courses, I provided students with a new way of understanding Never Let Me Go by helping them close read the implicit purposes and effects of the narrative strategy of its narrator who is a clone, as well as the striking homology between the educational system that justifies the sacrifice of cloned bodies and the current educational system in Korea in terms of their ideological functions. By focusing on the profound significance of the narration of the novel and the affinity between its fictional setting and the present reality, students also came to learn the author’s intent to disclose the prevalent oblivion to the complicated role and operation of empathy and education. Teaching Never Let Me Go as a novel on these issues, I conclude, can lead students to gain critical insights into their ideological and subversive possibilities.