A metaficção e a ficcionalidade da realidade social desumanizadora em Never let me go, de Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

Metafictional works have already been seen as texts which, focused upon its narcissistic self-contemplation, seemed to show no concern with the reality outside the text, which supposedly lacked political awareness. Further studies on the genre, however, especially in works by Patricia Waugh (2001), Linda Hutcheon (1980, 1991), Wenche Ommundsen (1993) and Gustavo Bernardo (2010), have either put such an interpretation into question or at least highlighted how, if metafictions do work as mirrors turned to its own narrative architecture, its reflex on the other hand has also allowed us to see the extratextual world which such narratives only seemingly ignored, while it actually proposes a critical reading of such reality, especially as regards several discourses which “naturalize” socially constructed relationships — a phenomenon that is relevant mainly when such discourses are unknowingly assimilated by the victims of such relationships themselves. Thus, by analysing the novel Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro, we try to show how clones created and used for “donating” organs, in an alternative historical reality, despite its strange plot, can be seen as metaphors of the excluded, the exploited, the oppressed and mainly the dehumanized ones in the reality that we recognise in our daily experience.