Personhood:

Fukuyama’s Caveats and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Authors

  • Kristine Brown

Keywords:

genetic engineering, cloning, eugenics, ethics, dystopia, speculation

Abstract

Together, fiction and rhetoric not only illustrate grim possibilities, but also the processes and rationale by which they occur. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005) documents the lives of cloned children in twentieth-century England whose sole purpose is to provide organs to keep their human predecessors alive. While the children mature to become donors or caregivers to peers undergoing donation, nothing exempts them from death following repeated organ harvesting. However unnerving, the novel tells of potential realities associated with genetic engineering, a trend conservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses in his work Our Post Human Future. This article endeavours to present Never Let Me Go as a fictional, yet an appropriate supplement to Fukuyama’s writing, incorporating new historicism and accentuating Fukuyama’s points of caution in Ishiguro’s novel. Through dissecting and discerning the complementary relationship of the two works, readers may garner enriched perspectives in debates on cloning and other forms of bioengineering.

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Author Biography

Kristine Brown

Kristine Brown is an independent researcher and freelance writer in San Antonio, Texas. She is especially interested in human rights and third-word politics. She completed her undergraduate studies at St. Mary’s University in 2013, majoring in international relations and psychology.

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Published

2021-10-28

How to Cite

Brown , K. . (2021). Personhood:: Fukuyama’s Caveats and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 2(1), 128–139. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/48