Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: A Marxist Reading of Brainwashing through Education

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) is an outstanding and thought-provoking novel that clearly presents how a dominant ideology gradually influences the students, shaping and conditioning their minds through the use of the school as a hegemonic institution. This process can be understood through the concept of brainwashing, a powerful device used to manipulate and control the minds of individuals, compelling them to adopt the views, values, and ideas of a specific system, which eventually creates a dependent and submissive individual. This study aims to explore how Never Let Me Go illustrates the process of the students’ brainwashing, leading them to passively accept their predestined roles as organ donors within the framework of the dominant ideology. It examines the novel from a Marxist perspective, emphasising how the school, as a key educational and ideological institution, exploits the students by turning them into mere means of production, thus making them live in a distorted and false reality. In this way, the students’ condition mirrors that of the exploited proletariat in a capitalist society.