E-ISSN: 1529-1456 Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2007.0025
McDonald, Keith.
Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as "Speculative
Memoir"
Biography - Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 74-83
University of
Hawai'i Press
Keith
McDonald - Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as
"Speculative Memoir" - Biography 30:1 Biography 30.1 (2007) 74-83
Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Days of Past Futures: Kazuo
Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go As "Speculative Memoir" Keith McDonald
Abstract This article considers Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novel Never
Let Me
Go as a text which utilizes memoir as a means of presenting a possible
future
where human rights are decimated, but where human stories remain. The
novel is
considered as an example of an ongoing science-fictional model where
life-writing acts as a window into a world where the individual's
experiences
guide the reader through the speculative world. The autobiographical
mode of
writing is often thought to be a genre in itself, a genre where the
self-penned
life story of those in the public eye is marked out by publishers as
having a
worthwhile story to tell. These apparently true life accounts are often
scrutinized for their authenticity, and this is often the case where
writers
bear witness to a traumatic event, an historical moment, or a perceived
social
injustice. Leigh Gilmore writes of the pitfalls that emerge when a
writer
represents trauma: Because testimonial projects require subjects to
confess, to
bear witness, to make public and shareable a private and intolerable
pain, they
enter into a legalistic frame in which their efforts can move quickly
beyond
their interpretation and control, become...