Blog Post #9

I think the use of the phrase really separates her world from the intended audience’s world. It sets her farther away from “normal.” Instead of just being a place in England, it becomes an entire different planet. This is emphasized when the ghost story is being explained about the girl who was a Hailsham student “until one day she’d climbed over a fence just to see what it was like outside” (page 50). The girl’s curiosity about the “outside,” meaning simply beyond the fence, drives her to climb that fence and is never let back in. The fact that the entire “boarding school” is fenced off added to the division of the worlds.
The intended audience is obviously someone that is not a part of Kathy H.’s world. Like I said, repetition of that phrase makes a distinction between us, the readers that live somewhat “normal” lives, and them, those living in Hailsham. Usually, the reader seems to relate to the narrator in the book (at least that’s been the case for me in many of the books we have read in this class); therefore “us” involves the reader and the narrator. I found it easy in this book to at least empathize with the narrator, which is a characteristic that we noted in class that relates to defining “us.” I think that is another reason that the author stressed the phrases like "I don't know how it is where you were….” It was a reminder, at least for me, that I am very different from Kathy H., or at least living an extremely different life. Kazuo Ishiguro may have also done this to make that connection. Although we are living different lives, we can still have similar personalities, goals, ambitions, etc. It was possibly a way to kind of let the reader be okay with empathizing with the main character.
It’s more complicated than that, because I’m confused at who us, them, and it even is in this book though. If I heard this story told through the eyes of someone from “my world,” I think I would categorize the people in Hailsham as “it.” The people in Hailsham are created for one purpose and are contained in this camp of sorts. When Kathy H. says, “did someone think we didn’t have souls?” (page 260) my ideas of who I thought us, them, and it were was completely changed. They’re simply clones, which I would typically refer to as “it,” but the entire book convinces me otherwise.