The novel is narrated by Kathy, a woman in her thirties who, along with her childhood friends, was created as a clone. Her sole purpose in life is to donate her organs after she comes of age. Much of the novel deals with her attempts to understand who she is and what the fate awaiting her in the future actually is.
Memory
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
In this quote, the speaker reflects on memory and how fast it fades. It always fades much faster than one expects, the quote says. But, the speaker suggests this doesn’t hold true for all memories. There are those that don’t ever fade, or at least ones that seem like they’re never going to fade.
The implication here is that there are only a few memories that are truly important in someone’s life.
I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.
In these lines, the speaker, Tommy, meditates on life and love. He’s speaking to the narrator, Kathy, about their relationship and how things have changed over their life. They’ve always cared for one another, but the nature of their existence means that they can’t really be together. They’ve drifted apart, knowing that they can’t stay together forever.
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
In this short quote from the novel, the speaker touches on solitude and how important it can be. They suggest that when one is immersed in one’s own thoughts one can become comfortable, so much so that where it seems like you might run into someone you know. When one remembers that their interior world is imaginary, this is a “shock” you have to adjust to.
The speaker has a deep and intricate interior life, so much so that they can find company and pleasure within their own thoughts in a way that many people can’t.
Humanity
We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
Here, Ishiguro includes one of the most painful parts of the narrative. The clones re given art (at least those who attend Hailsham, and are allowed to create. When that opportunity is taken away, it’s in order to “reveal” their souls or determine that they have souls at all.
This is something that for readers should be obvious, but for the often emotionless non-clones in the novel, it is not obvious. They treat Kathy, Tommy, Ruth, and all the other cloned individuals as sub-human.
What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
Here, the speaker contemplates the lives that clones lead and how different or not, those lives might be from the lives of those their bodies are used to save. They don’t have any agency over the donations they give, so, understandably, a lot of their time is spent considering what’s going to happen to them and where their various body parts are going to go.
This quote implies that, like the clones, regular human beings always feel like they, too, haven’t had enough time. There is never a moment in one’s life where it feels like one has truly lived all the days they wants to, the writer suggests.
It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
In this quote, the speaker considers life’s choices and compares particularly important ones to a move in chess. Sometimes, you make a choice, or move a chess piece, and just as you make the decision, or take your finger off the piece, you see you’ve made a mistake.
This mistake, the speaker adds, is not something that’s entirely clear at the moment. Instead, it’s something that’s going to play itself out over time. You’ll only know the true extent of the mistake you’ve made after some time passes.
You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
In these lines, the speaker is getting at an important fact of life— opinions, especially the overriding popular opinion about a topic in society, are bound to change. “You” might grow up when the opinion was one way, and then it might change. This relates various social issues to the overarching ethical concern of the clones and how their bodies are used in the novel.
Childhood
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
In this short quote, the speaker declares that all children have trauma and only those who claim not to grow up incredibly sheltered and ignorant. You would have to be “deceived” not to be traumatized by the world as you grow up.
