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Kathy tells her story with great emotional restraint and honesty. When she is not totally confident about the accuracy of her memory, she states clearly that ‘I might have some of it wrong’, ‘I don’t remember exactly’. Phrases such as ‘the way I remember it’, ‘my memory of it is that ...’ imply the possibility of a gap between memory and truth. The fluid and fragile nature of memory is further highlighted in places where Kathy disagrees with Ruth and Tommy about what happened, and where Kathy’s interpretation of the past is shaped by her friends’ remembrances.
Pointing at the uncertainties in Kathy’s memory, Mullan describes her as ‘an inadequate narrator.’ However, unlike the unreliable narrator who purposefully hides the truth or misleads the reader or listener, the uncertainties in Kathy’s narration have more to do with her inability to fully grasp the situation.
Currie points out certain features in Kathy’s narration in his analysis of the time structure of the novel.
First, as illustrated in such expressions as ‘I’d more or less forgotten about it when ...’, Kathy often recalls events she says she has forgotten for a long time.
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“ Amazing as always, gave her a week to finish a big assignment and came through way ahead of time. ”
Currie calls such rediscovery of lost memory ‘remembered forgetting.’
Another temporal feature is ‘recollected anticipation’. An example is Kathy’s description of Miss Lucy getting into trouble after exposing the truth to the students: ‘After that morning I became convinced something else – perhaps something awful – lay around the corner ... What I didn’t know at the time was that something pretty significant had happened only a few days after I’d seen her in Room 22’.
The fact that Miss Lucy had been dismissed is known by the mature narrator, but not the young Kathy, who only vaguely anticipates that something awful is going to happen.
Whether it is ‘remembered forgetting’ or ‘recollected anticipation,’ Kathy’s nostalgic remembrances can be connected to a deeper psychological mechanism. Nostalgia is, to a number of researchers, a positive emotion. Sedikides and his co-researchers assert that it is a mental exercise that fulfills such functions as ‘enhancement of the self, support of the cultural worldview, and bolstering of relational bonds.’24 Kathy’s recollection, ‘a deliberate response to an uncomfortable psychological state’,25 deepens her understanding of herself and her social environment. It also allows her to reconnect emotionally with her friends, creating a sense of warmth and secure attachment.
Aside from nostalgic emotion, Kathy has tried to recreate the ‘bygone world’ to better understand her past. Structuring one’s past experience and attempting to understand it as a unified whole is essentially an act of establishing an identity.
The Issue Of Memory in Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro. (2024, Feb 02). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-issue-of-memory-in-never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-essay
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