The Implementation of Social Abjection: Constructing and Contesting Disposability in the Neoliberal World of Never Let Me Go

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Document Type : Research Paper

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Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jor.2025.399947.2706

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) constructs a restrained yet profoundly unsettling dystopian world in which human clones are produced and brought up systematically for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Beneath the novel's apparently low-profile narrative is a disapproval of the social processes through which specific groups are abjected and excluded from moral regard. The study deploys Imogen Tyler's theory of social abjection, where the definition of abjection is revised as being enacted by institutional, discursive, and spatial processes. The article analyzes in the first section how the clones are constructed as abject subjects. It is proposed that following abjectifying tactics such as linguistic, media, and spatial stigmatization materialize the abject position of the clones, enabling their exploitation to be both possible and unproblematic in an ethical sense. The second section investigates the narrative voice of Kathy H., whose reflective and emotionally textured storytelling subtly disrupts the systems that define her as less than human. Although overt resistance is absent, Kathy’s narration becomes a quiet form of subversion that reclaims subjectivity. By situating Never Let Me Go in social abjection discourse, this work illustrates how literature can reveal and push back against the ideological assumptions of marginalization.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature

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Available Online from 12 May 2026

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