Option Two – Cultural context Never Let Me Go


to have some years together before beginning their donations. However, the world of the text is terribly harsh, and when Tommy and Kathy visit Miss Emily and Madame to ask about the deferrals, their hopes are dashed. Those who want the clones’ organs do not care if they are in love or not.


The traditional view in stories is that love conquers all, but Ishiguro is at pains to point out that this belief is irrational. At the end of the novel, Kathy is alone. Ruth and Tommy have ‘completed’ and she is about to begin her own donation journey. However, love has given her short life a great deal of meaning. She says, ‘I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them’. These precious memories of love are both uplifting and heartbreaking.


Brooklyn


they love one another. Despite Tony’s clear vision of their future together, it takes some time for Eilis to admit that she loves him and shares his hopes and dreams. Her reluctance does not portray marriage in a negative light, however. Instead, it shows that she equates marriage with love, unlike her fellow boarder, Sheila, who would marry ‘a bad tempered fella with hair growing out of his ears’ if it meant she could have her own home. Sheila represents the old-fashioned view that marriage is a woman’s only hope of a secure future. Eilis, on the other hand, is more independent and also more romantic.


The course of true love doesn’t run smoothly in the film and when Eilis returns to Ireland after her sister’s death, she is put under gentle pressure by her friends and family to settle down with the charming, well-off Jim Farrell. Eilis wrestles with her feelings but when the spiteful Miss Kelly reveals that she knows about Eilis’s marriage to Tony, Eilis sees where her true happiness lies. She leaves Ireland and rejoins Tony in New York. We get the impression that Eilis does not feel bound by marriage ties so much as bound by love for her husband. Like Kathy, Eilis learns that true love is what makes life worth living. Unlike Kathy, however, Eilis is left with more than just memories at the end of the text. As she reunites with Tony and as they embrace in the warm sunshine, we are left with the impression that love can triumph over all obstacles.


While there is little mention of organised religion in the novel, the students’ lives – and deaths – are nonetheless dictated by a belief that the soul is what makes a person human. The ‘normals’ believe the clones have no souls and therefore can be used as organ donors even though this inevitably leads


Although it might be expected that religion would play a more important role in a film about an Irish girl in the 1950s than it would in a dystopian novel set in England, the opposite is the case. Certainly, there is more evidence of organised religion in the film than in the


Philadelphia, Here I Come!


flashback in which he recalls the painful meeting with Senator Doogan, Gar recounts some of the details of Kate and Francis’s expensive wedding. He reflects that this memory ‘has left a deep scar on the aul skitter of a soul’ and was ‘a sore hoke on the aul prestige’.


Unlike Brooklyn, in which Eilis chooses Tony over Jim because she comes to see that love is more important than financial security or doing what is expected of her, Gar and Kate’s romance is doomed by a society in which women have little choice but to marry for practical reasons as they need to be supported by their husbands. Gar is not the only one damaged by this pragmatic but rather unfeeling attitude. Kate, despite her seemingly advantageous marriage, does not seem particularly happy. When Gar asks her, ‘Is Dr King well?’ she replies drily, ‘I hear no complaints’. The implication seems to be that she has little interest in how her husband feels but knows that she would be the first to hear about it if he were in any way unwell or dissatisfied. This is a far less positive view of love than we are left with at the end of Brooklyn or Never Let Me Go. In both the novel and the film, the message is that love makes life worth living, even if it is not perfect. In Philadelphia, Here I Come!, however, love brings nothing but pain and regret.


Religious beliefs affect the lives of the characters in each of the three texts.


Religion is portrayed in a far more negative light in Philadelphia, Here I Come! than in Brooklyn, but it is not as devastating an aspect of the characters’ lives as the belief system in Never Let Me Go. In the play, religion is represented by Canon O’Byrne, S.B.’s friend. He is not as helpful or compassionate as Father


Leaving Certificate English Excellence in Texts


415


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