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Abstract
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This is relevant and much needed for contemporary literary studies in that it directly addresses the ever more prominent intersection between narrative form and trauma theory. The meaning transcends many levels.
To begin with, Never Let Me Go is a major study critique of postmodern narrative strategies that deserves close examination. The novel reimagines unreliability not as an ‘infelicity,’ ‘handicap’ or mere literary lark, but as the inescapable and fundamental product of a consciousness splintering under systemic stress and dehumanization. This work interrogates the ways in which trauma disrupts traditional lines of chronological narration and alters our very capacity for neutral historical observation or testimony. This has particular salience for the reading of trauma literature.
In this way, the study locates abstractions like biopolitics, personhood and historical witnessing within the narrator's experiential psychological suffering. The dystopian world of the novel where one is farmed for organs and brought into existence as resources has created a unique psychological pressure cooker crossing, that forces an exploration of consciousness in extreme conditions. This research argues that the ethical debate of cloning and genetic engineering is secondary to how these experiences get framed as stories. Kathy's emotional denial and partial memories are psychological defenses--adaptive responses to unbearable truth. Scrutinizing the techniques and their use is important to understanding how those who are discriminated against and underprivileged construct their own experiences within narrative strictures created by governing systems under which they have lived.
This study makes a substantial contribution to the on-going debates about "the architecture of memory" in modern literature, showing that literary strategies are vital for finding expression for experiences which escape from conventional realist narrative. Content transmutes structure; the style becomes th
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