I felt that the whole book was about what it would take for someone to totally acquiesce to a position of being completely dehumanized, of not even thinking of themself as fully human, to knowingly consent to a life that seems intolerable: the slowness, the emphasis on the small conflicts of school, etc, exist to me in order to underline the way they're being raised to live in a 'normality' that perpetrates their own disposability. The creepiest thing about Hailsham is the fact that it tries to give them a certain quality of life *without* humanizing them (I disagree that it's a 'normal' school). I feel like the novel is asking what it would take to realize a pretty much perfect form of oppression, by basically removing all capacity for structural criticism and only leaving the individual dream of love etc.
The scientific worldbuilding issues I agree with, but I found I didn't mind because the psychological and ideological worldbuilding held up so well for me. I don't actually find that absence of resistance to be at all likely, but Ishiguro makes me believe in it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-02-19 10:05 pm (UTC)The scientific worldbuilding issues I agree with, but I found I didn't mind because the psychological and ideological worldbuilding held up so well for me. I don't actually find that absence of resistance to be at all likely, but Ishiguro makes me believe in it.