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This essay is a comparative response to the texts ‘Never Let Me Go’ and ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’. It primarily addresses how the destruction of hope impacts the characters.
Description
Take a sneak peek of this comparing texts essay.
Comparing Texts
Texts: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
Note that this essay is way too long.
‘Your life must now set the course that’s been sent for it’ NLMG (p. 261)
‘She’s exactly the kind of romantic that’s got no instinct to make it’ – Things We Didn’t See Coming (p50)
Compare how the destruction of hope affects characters in both texts.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian text ‘Never Let Me Go’ reveals how hope and its nemesis, despair, can be a source of unification, bringing together childhood friends Kathy H, Tommy and Ruth. Influencing the actions of the unnamed protagonist in ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’, cynicism leads to the erosion of relationships. Assembling a collection of nine vignettes that track a moment in the life of an unnamed protagonist, Steven Amsterdam’s speculative fiction novel documents the demise of hope as the narrator’s exposure to the harsh climatic conditions of extreme weather events and political turbulence leads him to abandon any notion of an idealised future such as the utopia his father envisions. Kazuo Ishiguro examines how Kathy H. and Tommy respond to the truth that their “lives are set out” for them and that their futures are finite, solidifying friendships, whilst Amsterdam entertains the notion that the forfeiting of relationships and the preference for solitariness, is a reaction to despair. Moreover, in succumbing to the hedonism of the rich and powerful such as Senator Juliet the narrator in ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’ also relinquishes his identity and his moral core. In both texts it seems, the concomitant connection between hope and humanity is evident. Vacillating between the confusion of a child desperately seeking affirmation and the fear of an adult confronted with an uncontestable truth, Tommy’s visceral reaction conveys the impact of despair on individuals for whom hope becomes a form of denial. In Amsterdam’s text, hopelessness becomes a normalised condition of existence and the narrator’s response reflects his acclimatisation to this reality.
