What is it about?
This article looks at the ethics of human and non-human animals as they are depicted in the 2005 science fiction novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and the 2010 film adaptation by Mark Romanek. Both stories are set in an alternative past. This article argues that through narrational and audio-visual address respectively, the reader and viewer are encouraged to bear witness from a liminal, "creaturely" position.
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Why is it important?
The article considers the creative tools that writers and filmmakers use to move their readers or viewers, and encourage them to identify with the 'other.'
Perspectives
The uncanniness of the alternative history here had a personal inflection for me, as it depicted England at a time when I was living there - albeit a different sci-fi version of it.
Dr Djoymi Baker
RMIT University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Being the Spiders”: The Human-Animal in Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, Journal of Animal Ethics, October 2021, University of Illinois Press,
DOI: 10.5406/janimalethics.11.2.0097.
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