Post by travistoal on Jun 4, 2014 19:20:46 GMT
Books like "1984" are universally spooky and unnerving to people, due to how alien Orwell's world is. Readers can lose themselves in the unrelatable universe, and look at the hyperbolic police state as a way to remember the need to protect our own liberties.
The funny thing is, that completely misses the point of the book. Orwell originally intended to title the novel "1948," as a message about the police state he already saw America as. However, his editors thought that a bit edgy -- doing so would force the reader to confront uncomfortable truths, and customers were more likely to buy a novel allowing them to escape into fantasy. "Never Let Me Go" doesn't make an attempt to hide how similar it is to our society, and the thought that, like Orwell, Ishiguro was making a metaphor for the *current* state of society makes the novel not just a political message condemning eugenics, medical lack of ethics, etc., but rather a message condemning "wage slavery." The children in Halisham are born and bred for one purpose: to give what they have to the society that created it. They live a life unable to truly follow their dreams or live up to their full potential due to their commitments to the "normals," which they are, ultimately, dependent upon. This reflects modern society's raising of children to serve the state, to feed the economy with a 9-5 job as a pencil-pusher. They give their time and their youth as a cog in the machine, only to be spat out when they lose their usefulness.
This quickly turned into a strange anarchist manifesto. Nonetheless, a realistic dystopian novel allows for more variations and interpretations, as opposed to super sci-fi books.
The funny thing is, that completely misses the point of the book. Orwell originally intended to title the novel "1948," as a message about the police state he already saw America as. However, his editors thought that a bit edgy -- doing so would force the reader to confront uncomfortable truths, and customers were more likely to buy a novel allowing them to escape into fantasy. "Never Let Me Go" doesn't make an attempt to hide how similar it is to our society, and the thought that, like Orwell, Ishiguro was making a metaphor for the *current* state of society makes the novel not just a political message condemning eugenics, medical lack of ethics, etc., but rather a message condemning "wage slavery." The children in Halisham are born and bred for one purpose: to give what they have to the society that created it. They live a life unable to truly follow their dreams or live up to their full potential due to their commitments to the "normals," which they are, ultimately, dependent upon. This reflects modern society's raising of children to serve the state, to feed the economy with a 9-5 job as a pencil-pusher. They give their time and their youth as a cog in the machine, only to be spat out when they lose their usefulness.
This quickly turned into a strange anarchist manifesto. Nonetheless, a realistic dystopian novel allows for more variations and interpretations, as opposed to super sci-fi books.
