Kazuo Ishiguro and the Legacy of Aspirational Individualism

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go has, within literary scholarship, been primarily framed as a science fiction novel concerned with cloning and genetic questions of ‘the self’. This article offers a new perspective on the novel by analysing the ways in which it is also about the legacy of a particularly Thatcherite notion of aspirational individualism. To this end, I consider the extent to which the stories of the main characters of Ishiguro’s novel – Kathy, Ruth and Tommy – are also stories of unfulfilled ambition. Placing the novel within contemporary debates about aspirational individualism, the article considers how Ishiguro – while critical of Thatcherite ideas of aspiration – nonetheless concedes that a belief in such ideas gives structure, fulfilment and meaning to individual lives.