Saturday, January 31, 2015

What are some key evidences of the purported idea of Hailsham? Analyze their significance.

Kazuo Ishiguro allows the reader to learn gradually what Hailsham is. Through using Kathy’s point of view as she looks back, he restricts the information to her recollections of how she learned about its purposes. Thus the ominous character of the “school” itself, as well as the larger social project into which it fits, grows in scope and intensity until the reader is fully absorbed in the dystopian horror of her society and comes to understand what she means by the “completion” she anticipates.
At first it seems like Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are students at a posh “public” school. The students have sports and extracurricular enrichment activities such as art. Kathy learns from Tommy that one “guardian,” Miss Lucy (who soon leaves her post), is concerned about the limited academic components. Kathy probes Miss Emily, the head guardian, about the Gallery and Madame’s visits to choose the best artworks. Thus the author reveals that the institution is more like a juvenile detention center than a school. None of the children living there seems to have any relatives; they acquire personal possessions only through art exchanges; they are not allowed beyond the fence; and they do not go home for holidays. Fear of transgressing the boundaries and encountering the outside world is inculcated into the children. Through all this information, the reader comes to see that their environment is tightly controlled to repress and mislead rather than protect and nurture them.
Hailsham’s true function is finally confirmed when the former students, now adults living in the “cottages,” meet with Miss Emily. She speaks of the humanity and compassion that motivated an arrangement meant to give some comfort to the clones as they were being raised as organ donors. The concept, however, has gone out of vogue; in subsequent generations, it has been deemed unnecessary to mystify the clones’ purpose and they are reared in more basic breeding centers. Consideration for the clones’ feelings, along with the core concept that they are as fully human as their “originals,” has become a thing of the past.

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