카즈오 이시구로의 『나를 보내지 마』읽기

Reading (with) Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This paper focuses on the notion of care and its psychosocial implications in and out of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The narrator-protagonist Kathy defines herself as a carer, and it is in the capacity of a carer that she reconnects with her childhood friends Ruth and Tommy and sorts out their tangled relationship. Beginning with an analysis of Kathy’s caring as “affective labor” delineated by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the novel’s theme is revealed: the nature of her care labor and the way in which she eventually “lets go” of her prolonged career as a career. In this sense, Never Let Me Go is less the story of Kathy’s life as carer per se than that of how she cuts it short in order to embrace death—or “suicide”— by voluntarily choosing to become a donor. The readers can further examine what, or more precisely who, clone carers including Kathy stand for in the novel—namely, the question of who actually performs the hands-on care work both in Korean and global context.