Suppose & Supposition

My previous essay was on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. I’m going to plow through all of the “letting go” puns that come to mind and transition straight into a curious motif I noticed toward the end of the novel.

As a brief recap (and also huge spoilers), Never Let Me Go follows the brief lives of three students from Halisham, a boarding school for clones that grow up and are eventually expected to donate their organs until it costs them their lives. Again, the vast majority of the book is not about this dystopian scenario. It explores the difficulties of childhood, the complexities of friendship, and the blossoming love shared between the three main characters. But the bleak nature of their inevitable future hangs over their lives like a storm cloud. Curiously, when death does finally come for some of them, it’s not a cacophony of thunder and lightning but a gentle rainstorm that washes away the pain. I suspect that they’ve waited for death for so long that, when it comes, it’s a relief. 

To reiterate, I feel that Never Let Me Go falls into the dystopian science fiction category. We have a scientific advancement--cloning--that created a terrifying world where some people are born only to be sacrificed for the well-being of others. I’m reminded of John Harris’ thought experiment: The Survival Lottery. Very briefly, this mental exercise suggests that if we can kill and harvest the organs of one person to save two other people, we are morally obligated to do this because--all things being equal--two lives are more valuable than one. And the odds only get better as we increase the number of people saved. One person gets a new heart, two people get new kidneys, a couple lungs are doled out, bone marrow harvested, on and on. How many people might we save by murdering one person? How many people’s lives are worth the life of one innocent?

I think it’s natural to feel an immediate revulsion to this thought experiment, but it’s also hard to argue against the cold, cruel, life-saving logic it presents. Like the Trolley Problem and other utilitarian philosophical conundrums, the Survival Lottery serves as a psychological laboratory to explore impossible situations that most people will (hopefully) never address in real life.

But the society in Never Let Me Go doesn’t just accept the Faustian bargain of raising people like cattle only to harvest their organs upon reaching adulthood, but it has fully embraced this approach. There is very little else about the world presented to the reader. The main characters spend their lives in isolation, the Halisham boarding school or the Cottages, an isolated estate deep in the English countryside. There is only one city explored in the novel, Norfolk, and it seems peaceful enough. No war. No famine. They have a Woolworth’s and office buildings and second hand shops and art galleries. But the world that has solved heart disease and cancer by birthing, raising, and killing its own children is--from my view and I hope yours, too--a dystopia. Low key. Lowercase d.

With science fiction, the general trend in the genre--perhaps specifically in the young adult variety--is for plucky protagonists to band together, wage a guerilla war on the entrenched fascist state, and come out scarred but victorious. Think Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games or the Divergent and Maze Runner series. Many adult dystopias don’t wrap up on such a rosy note. There’s 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and the one that always makes me want to give up on life and donate my organs by the end, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. 

But even in these novels, there are salient points of resistance. For a time, Winston in 1984 frees himself (or perhaps thinks himself free) of Big Brother. Our book-burning fireman in Fahrenheit 451 sees the (nuclear) light and realizes the importance of ideas even as his wife, home, and hometown are consumed in an atomic apocalypse. 

But the furthest the characters in Never Let Me Go are willing to rebel is to seek out their old headmaster and ask for a deferral. They don’t try to run, and certainly no armed insurrection is ever plotted. They don’t even ask to be freed of the inevitable sacrifice they were born and bred to make. They just want a little more time to be together, to be human and be in love, before acquiescing to their fate. For me, this mindset comes down to a single word, oft repeated toward the end of the book. It’s a powerful word, but quiet, sly, carrying the hidden weight of the entire dystopia on its seven letters. 

That word is “suppose.”

Each of the novel’s three main characters--Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth--use this word toward the end of the book. And they use it in very similar ways. Without noting who said what, here are those three passages:

FIRST

“I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt about enough for me . . . I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?” [emphasis the author’s] (p. 227). 

SECOND

[When one character rejects the idea of rushing to become an organ donor, another character responds by saying] “I suppose you’re right . . . You are a really good carer. You’d be the perfect one for me too if you weren’t you” [emphasis mine] (p. 282).

THIRD

[The final sentence of the book, after two of the main characters have died] “. . . though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be” [emphasis mine] (p. 286).

To step away from those quotes briefly, I’d like to consider the word “suppose”. Suppose is not “want” or “need” or “must” or have to.” “I want to do something” is an expression of desire, an indication that it would be nice or ideal if something would happen. “I must do something” is a statement of necessity. Something must happen . . . Or else.

But “I suppose I should do something” is pointing at a reluctance, a dragging of the feet. There is something that should be done, that’s clear, and the speaker is expressing a willingness to do it, but also a reticence. It is not necessarily what they want to do. It’s a fuzzy word.

So, when these three characters use the word “suppose” in this way, they recognize--if seemingly unconsciously--that their world is fucked up. “I suppose we were born to donate our organs,” is an agonizing cry for help. The speaker is looking for someone to disagree with them. “I suppose you’re right to put off donating your organs,” is actually a disagreement. “I suppose you’re right to not offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb,” likely means that that person isn’t entirely sure of that statement at all.

And the third example is the most telling. The third character, speaking only to the reader, says they drove over to wherever they were supposed to be. They didn’t necessarily want to go where they were going. They didn’t really need to go there. They were supposed to go there. There is an unnamed external force exerting its will upon that character, guiding their thoughts as they’re conveyed to us on the page. 

And THAT is the most dystopian aspect of the novel. It’s what makes dystopias--fictional or real--function. It’s not that science created clones. We have those now: Dolly the sheep, cloned versions of dead pets. And it’s not even the harvesting of organs from the unwilling. Again, plenty of examples of black markets for organs or China’s habit of harvesting the bits of executed prisoners. 

We experiment on animals all the time, and on humans not infrequently. We have the so-called founder of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, conducting surgical experiments on enslaved Black women, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and, famously, Nazis experimenting on Jews and others during the Holocaust. Humans are more than capable of treating their fellow beings as objects of study, setting aside another’s pain for some distant, abstract greater purpose. That idea, distilled human cruelty for progress, is only dystopian if you’re completely uninformed about world history.

What is dystopian about the world of Never Let Me Go is that so few characters question the system. The dystopian mindset has won. The clones appear incapable of conceiving of a future that includes their survival. The battle of wills is over and our clone protagonists were utterly defeated. As I mentioned a few essays back, the work of Franz Fanon, particularly in The Wretched of the Earth, goes to great lengths to explain how a colonizing force stays in power not by superior military might but by convincing the colonized subject that the battle has already been won by the colonizers. When there is no room to think of a future beyond one’s inevitable sacrifice to the state apparatus, the fascists have won without firing a bullet. It’s not unlike the methods used by O’Brien and Big Brother against Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. The bad guys win not by crushing their enemies (since rulers need someone to rule) but by arresting the minds of their subjects until there is no conceivable outcome save for the state’s utter, inevitable, and above all, righteous victory. 

While reading Never Let Me Go, a part of me hoped I’d see a rebellion against the status quo, that the two characters in love would escape, leave their bloody destinies behind, and find peace, if only until they’re caught and face the firing squad. Perhaps not a firing squad. The risk to their organs is too great. Chemical euthanasia, I suppose. But Ishiguro doesn’t give us that ending. Not even a hint of rebellion. He leaves us with “suppose.” And that, perhaps, is the most beneficial of endings. It’s surely a long way from the ending of Michael Bay’s thematically related film, The Island. But a book that ends with toppled statues of dictators and dancing in the streets does not teach us anything. In fact, it may do harm by convincing us that the bad guys always lose and good inevitably triumphs. The truth is far too many dictators and war criminals die of old age, in their comfy beds, nestled snugly in palaces built of misery, blood, and death. 

But Ishiguro gifts us “suppose.” What are we, as individuals living in this modern world, supposed to do? What are the things that we feel that we must do to keep society happy, but which we are personally hesitant to do? Are there things that we are supposed to do but should be opposed to? The answer is yes. Absolutely, resoundingly yes. What are they? How do we spot them? How do we shed ourselves of these supposed tasks? For that, I have no answers. But let’s keep looking and thinking and asking why: why am I doing this? For whose benefit is this done? Is this what I’m supposed to do or is this unjust? This process of critically questioning society’s commandments is what we must do if we wish to form a better world.