Personal Growth and Confinement: A Spatial Study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Zhixing Nie, Hardev Kaur, Manimangai Mani

Abstract


This article analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) through the lens of spatial theories by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Gaston Bachelard, focusing on the protagonist Kathy’s growth within spatial and societal constraints. By tracing Kathy’s journey from childhood at Hailsham to disillusioned adulthood, the study examines how her interactions with geographical, social, and psychological spaces shape her evolving self-awareness and identity. The novel’s depiction of clones, confined within institutions like Hailsham and the cottages, serves as a metaphor for marginalized groups, highlighting their struggles for self-assertion in oppressive systems. Spatial analysis reveals how physical spaces (e.g., Hailsham, donation centres) reflect societal control, while social spaces (e.g., Kathy’s relationships with Tommy and Ruth) influence her understanding of her role. Psychological spaces, including memories and dreams, further illuminate her growth. Ultimately, this article argues that Kathy’s journey symbolizes the resilience and agency of marginalized communities. By navigating and resisting spatial constraints, she embodies the possibility of personal growth amidst oppression. Ishiguro advocates for recognizing the humanity and dignity of those rendered invisible by societal structures. This study contributes to the scholarship on spatiality in literature by offering new perspectives on the intersections of personal growth, confinement, and identity in Never Let Me Go.

 


Keywords


Kazuo Ishiguro; Never Let Me Go; growth; confinement; spatial study

Full Text:

PDF

References


AlAmmouri, B., & Salman, D. (2021). From Bildungsroman to Geschäftsroman: The Posthuman Neoliberal Novel. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 21(2).

Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space. Penguin.

Bal, M. (2009). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. University of Toronto Press.

Beckett, A. E., Bagguley, P., & Campbell, T. (2017). Foucault, social movements and heterotopic horizons: rupturing the order of things. Social movement studies, 16(2), 169-181.

Bellamy, R. (2024). Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-century political thought and practice. Taylor & Francis.

Bergson, H., Paul, N. M., & Palmer, W. S. (2004). Matter and memory. Courier Corporation.

Black, J. E., & Barnes, J. L. (2021). Pushing the boundaries of reality: Science fiction, creativity, and the moral imagination. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 15(2), 284.

Bouacida, S., Lecheheb, I., Boumali, I., & Khlifa, N. (2021). Hailsham as an Intimate Space: A Bachelardian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, 5.

Bushkin, H., van Niekerk, R., & Stroud, L. (2021). Searching for meaning in chaos: Viktor Frankl’s story. Europe's Journal of Psychology, 17(3), 233.

Cao, X. (2019). The multiple bodies of the Three-Body Problem. Extrapolation, 60(2), 183-200.

Chen, Y. (2021). The Dilemma of Identity Construction of Cloned Individuals from the Perspective of Space in Never Let Me Go. Overseas English 2, 212-213.

Chimisso, C. (2017). Gaston Bachelard’s Places of the Imagination and Images of Space. Place, Space and Hermeneutics, 183-195.

Cole, M. B. (2023). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 76(1), 267-278.

Conaway, C. (2021). ‘All the world's a [post-apocalyptic] stage’: The Future of Shakespeare in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. Critical Survey, 33(2), 1-16.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr, I. (2002). On the grotesque in science fiction. Science fiction studies, 71-99.

De Certeau, M., & Rendall, S. F. (2004). from The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). The City Cultures Reader, 3(2004), 266.

Decker, S., Hassard, J., & Rowlinson, M. (2021). Rethinking history and memory in organization studies: The case for historiographical reflexivity. Human Relations, 74(8), 1123-1155.

Driver, F. (1985). Power, space, and the body: a critical assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3(4), 425-446.

Edrei, S. M., Chen F.; Posner, Orin (Ed.). (2019). New Forms of Space and Spatiality in Science Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Farzanfar, D., Spiers, H. J., Moscovitch, M., & Rosenbaum, R. S. (2023). From cognitive maps to spatial schemas. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 24(2), 63-79.

Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. diacritics, 16(1), 22-27.

Friedrich, J., & Shanks, R. (2023). ‘The prison of the body’: school uniforms between discipline and governmentality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(1), 16-29.

Hadi, N. H. A., & Asl, M. P. (2022). The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic: A Lacanian Reading of Ramita Navai's City of Lies. Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, 22(1).

Harvey, D. (2020). The condition of postmodernity. In The New social theory reader (pp. 235-242). Routledge.

Hawkes, J. (2024). Geological Agency: Rethinking the Anthropocene through the Broken Earth Trilogy. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 31(3), 545-565.

Henri, L., & Donald, N.-S. (1991). The production of space. Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Hope, A. (2005). Panopticism, play and the resistance of surveillance: case studies of the observation of student Internet use in UK schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(3), 359-373.

Ikezono, H. (2024). Nonhuman/Posthuman Aspects in Kazuo Ishiguro’s New Millennium Novels. In Japanese Perspectives on Kazuo Ishiguro (pp. 291-312). Springer.

Ishiguro, K. (2017). Never Let Me Go: With GCSE and A Level study guide. Faber & Faber.

Jasim Khammas, H. (2025). Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 25(1), 11.

Kaplan, E. K. (1972). Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of imagination: An introduction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 33(1), 1-24.

Kenny, I. (2020). The Right to Tlatelolco: Space, State and Home in Rojo amanecer (1989), Directed by Jorge Fons. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 97(10), 1113-1129.

Kiat, V. G. W. (2017). Gifting the Body, Reading the Secret: Derridean Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go National University of Singapore (Singapore)].

Lawson, B. (2007). Language of space. Routledge.

Lee, J. Y., & Kim, S. D. (2023). The emergence of post-narrativity in the era of artificial intelligence: a non-anthropocentric perspective on the new ecology of narrative agency. Semiotica, 2023(253), 117-154.

Low, S. M. (2023). Why public space matters. Oxford University Press.

Mattar, N. (2022). Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 23(4), 9.

Minico, E. D. (2019). Spatial and psychophysical domination of women in dystopia: Swastika Night, Woman on the Edge of Time and The Handmaid’s Tale. Humanities, 8(1), 38.

Moldovan, R. (2020). The dystopian transformation of urban space in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. American, British and Canadian Studies(34), 103-123.

Murphy, R. (2021). Castration Desire: Less Is More in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. English Studies, 102(6), 759-777.

Nakamura, A. (2021). On the Uses of Nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Science Fiction Studies, 48(1), 62-76.

Olumofin, O. (2025). Rewriting the nation: Mobility, technological panopticism, and identity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 1-14.

Pallathadka, L. K., Pallathadka, H., Joshi, S., & Debsingha, N. (2021). Kazuo Ishiguro’s Use of Clones as a Metaphor to Express Human Values and Emotions in Never Let Me Go. Journal of Cardiovascular Disease Research, 12(03), 1643-1648.

Park, H. Y. (2024). Hospital space interpreted according to Heidegger’s concepts of care and dwelling. Medical Humanities, 50(1), 135-143.

Patrão, A. (2022). Foucault’s Relation with Architecture: The Interest of His Disinterest. Architecture and Culture, 10(2), 207-225.

Pattison, D. (2024). Neoliberal Humanism: Never Let Me Go and the Value of the Humanities. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 1-16.

Rachmani, J. E. (2021). Here Time Becomes Space: The Victorian Spatial Imaginary City University of New York].

Rich, K. (2015). " Look in the Gutter": Infrastructural Interiority in Never Let Me Go. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 61(4), 631-651.

Ruggiero, G., Ruotolo, F., Orti, R., Rauso, B., & Iachini, T. (2021). Egocentric metric representations in peripersonal space: A bridge between motor resources and spatial memory. British Journal of Psychology, 112(2), 433-454.

Salisbury, L. (2006). Michel Serres: Science, fiction, and the shape of relation. Science fiction studies, 30-52.

Shabanirad, E., & Dadkhah, M. (2017). A Foucauldian Study of Space and Power in Two Novels by Nadine Gordimer. Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, 17(4).

Sheridan, A. (1977). Discipline and punish. Pantheon New York.

Sloane, P. (2023). Empathy and the ethics of posthuman reading in Never Let Me Go. In Kazuo Ishiguro (pp. 146-169). Manchester University Press.

Snaza, N. (2015). The Failure of Humanizing Education in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 26(3), 215-234.

Solak, S. (2022). Reading Architecture, City and Space in Latife Tekin's Novels Through Henri Lefebvre. Gazi University Journal of Science Part B: Art Humanities Design and Planning, 10(2), 185-194.

Toker, L., & Chertoff, D. (2008). Reader response and the recycling of topoi in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 6(1), 163-180.

Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149.

von Schriltz, K. (1999). Foucault on the prison: Torturing history to punish capitalism. Critical Review, 13(3-4), 391-411.

Williams, N. (2021). Mapping Social Memory: A psychotherapeutic psychosocial approach. Springer.

Zhuang, Z. C. (2024). Suburban Migration: Interrogating the Intersections of Global Migration and Suburban Transformation. In Migration and Cities: Conceptual and Policy Advances (pp. 227-240). Springer International Publishing Cham.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/gema-2025-2501-14

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2131

ISSN : 1675-8021