Never Let Me Go - Seven

"Your lives are set out for you.  You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs.  That's what each of you was created to do" (pg 81).

After reading through the entire list of 108 literary terms searching for the perfect term to describe the above excerpt, I decided that it is probably best represented through a double conflict.

The most evident conflict is the external conflict between the students at Hailsham and regular society.  Like farm animals, the students are actually only being created so that the rest of the world can use their vital organs.  While reading this chapter, I really felt bad for the students who were just informed of their impending deaths and lifestyles, but then I remembered back to health class with Mrs. Schembra.  She told us that "104,748 U.S. patients are currently waiting for an organ transplant; more than 4,000 new patients are added to the waiting list each month" and that "every day, 18 people die while waiting for a transplant of a vital organ, such as a heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lung or bone marrow."  Regenerative medicine research, at least according to Wikipedia, began to spike interest in the late 1990s, which may have spiked the interest for Ishiguro to write this book.

Back to the external conflict.  These "lab mice," of sorts, were being kept unaware of their futures because people wanted them to live a seemingly normal lifestyle despite knowing that they never could.  This probably explains why Madame was so freaked out by the girls almost touching her, further explaining the conflict.

The second conflict mentioned was an internal conflict with Miss Lucy.  The students were being "told and not told" all of the information about their futures for whatever reasons Hailsham had decided, but Miss Lucy did not believe it to be fair to the students.  Her heart told her that the students should be told about the plans already installed for their futures, but her brain had been wired to do nothing about it.  This sort of relates with Bernard Marx in Brave New World who had seen the evils in the world, but could not do anything about it.  Finally, Miss Lucy was tired of the exploiting of the children and told them that they would eventually be killed for their organs.