The Ubiquitous Ability-Disability System

As a writer who has won the Nobel Prize and has been nominated several times for the Booker Prize,Kazuo Ishiguro has received a lot of attention in the Western critic community.Since Never Let Me Go was published in 2005,it has attracted great attention from Western critics.Researches on Never Let Me Go have started early and gone deep.To some extent,Never Let Me Go is a science fiction,which tells the life experience of a group of clones and their stories as donors.This thesis,which contains three chapters in addition to the introduction and the conclusion,makes an attempt to interpret the novel on the basis of an analysis of the binary opposition: ability and disability.The first chapter is based on the concept of the disabled in sociological research.The analysis reveals that the existence of the clones is precise because of human's fear of being disabled.Under the influence of survival of the fittest in eugenics,,people become afraid of being marginalized.Humans have created clones who can donate organs to them so that they can control disability better.Although some groups and individuals want to reverse the ability-disability system,which is established by power,from the perspective of morality and bioethics,the effect was tiny.The second chapter explores the absolute dominance of humans in the world where human society and clonal society coexist,pointing out that in this mixed world,clones are the disabled without a soul.This part also demonstrates that clones cannot escape from the fate that humans have arranged for them through an examination of the living environment of clones,their relationships with humans that sets them off from the humans,their attempts to overturn the ability-disability system and tries to arouse public thinking about the disabled.The third chapter reveals that the ability-disability mechanism also exists in clonal society.It is the expulsion and marginalization of the strength that makes the weak clones disabled.This thesis points out the three ability-disability systems in the novel,that is: the system within human society,the system between human society and the clonedhuman world,the system within the clonal world,and then it explains how each of these three systems is constructed from several aspects.The innovation of this thesis is its application of the sociological disability theory to literary criticism.By exposing the ability-disability mechanism in the novel,it is hopeful that the society would raise its consciousness of the right of the disabled group.The purpose of this research is to uncover the three-fold ability-disability mechanism implied in the novel by exploring the living circumstances of different worlds and put forward the following viewpoints: the society lacks tolerance and care for the disabled.Public attitudes towards the disabled should be more tolerant and must accept the imperfect in the evolution of species,rather than exclude and unfairly treat disabled groups under the influence of eugenics.