it's just a book, it's just a book, it's just a book, it's just a book

I read the assignment for this weeks blog and thought, wow that's easy. Just plop down what I thought at the end of class and I'm done. Then I remembered that the story has been lingering with me for quite some time and I don't know where to begin with this. Why not where I left off on my last blog. The phrase "I don't know how it is where you were"

After thinking about it I remembered poetics one of our first readings. There was a lot of talk about pity and how it makes for a good story. The above mentioned phrase is supposed to stop Kathy H's audience from feeling pity. I'm talking about her direct audience here, the donor in her care, not us, Ishiguro's readers. Kathy H. is setting a tone. She is acknowledging that it is most likely her life was much better than the life of her patient. Several people in class talked about the participants in the donor programme not knowing any better. Kathy does. She knows that her life could have been worse had it not been for Hailsham.

She is telling her story in the complete and full understanding that everything she describes is better than what her audience has experienced. She is not asking for pity and that is what makes the story even more difficult to stomach. She isn't invoking any fear either. She did in me, but if I had been lying in bed recovering from whatever stage in the donation programme everything she said would seem comforting. A few people in class were deeply moved and almost choked up about this story I don't think they felt comforted by anything she said or described. Ishiguro has managed to take something truly horrific and frame it in a way that makes it seem like a happy childhood memory.

When I criticised L'engle for demonizing the personified evil like her man with the red eyes, Ishiguro has done the opposite. He has taken the guardians and made them human and fallible. The greater evil is recognized as such. "It" is the nebulous sickening thought that everybody is ok with the donor programme, the feeding of technological advance with bio mass, nameless, faceless, soulless. We come away from the book, not angry at the guardians or the doctors who perform the donation procedures but with us, the people who stand idly by. My feelings of frustration with the donors themselves are hard to place. If I identified with the donors, I could only do so knowing I wouldn't go down without a fight otherwise I think this book would be too much for me.