"What We're Supposed To Be Doing": Ideology and Structural Injustice in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

This essay examines the difficulties inherent in recognizing and contesting structural injustice via an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel Never Let Me Go . I argue that the novel is a sophisticated meditation on the role of ideology in sustaining the reproduction of structural injustice. By presenting a world in which those who stand to suffer from grossly unjust sociopolitical arrangements simply do not contemplate the possibility of resistance, Ishiguro offers a troubling portrait of the human tendency to accept oppressive systems as "normal." The characters who inhabit the novel's world do not share the reader's horror; and where political activism does exist, it is a feeble reformism that merely promotes a new and improved version of the status quo. In our own era, the interconnected injustices posed by global climate collapse, militarized borders, genocide, endemic racism, and unfettered neoliberal capitalism bear a striking resemblance to Ishiguro's world. The question is: has wholesale political transformation become similarly unthinkable for us because we fail to recognize the problems?