Comparative Study Never Let Me Go


to death. Miss Emily and Madame explain to Tommy and Kathy that they set up Hailsham and encouraged the children to be creative in order to ‘reveal your souls. Or, to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all’. Ultimately, however, people decide to ignore the inconvenient evidence and continue to claim that the clones are ‘less than human’ because they do not have souls. Kathy, Tommy, Ruth and the other students are fated to die because of this deeply flawed belief system.


Brooklyn


novel, but it is portrayed in a positive light overall. Religion does not have as much of an impact on Eilis’s life as the argument about the existence of souls has on the lives of the clones in Never Let Me Go.


The main representative of religion in the film is Father Flood, the kindly priest who sets Eilis up with a job and a place to stay in New York. Father Flood represents all that is good about organised religion. He is a caring, compassionate man and is Eilis’s first port of call when she is desperately homesick. He arranges night classes for her and sees that they are paid for by a parishioner who wants to atone for his sins. Attending these night classes gives Eilis a newfound confidence and she decides she will become a bookkeeper. Father Flood is proud of Eilis’s academic success and promises to continue to help her. It is clear that religion has a far more positive role in the film Brooklyn than it does in Never Let Me Go. While a flawed belief system deprives the characters in the novel of their very lives, Eilis is given a new lease of life through her connection with a Catholic priest.


Philadelphia, Here I Come!


Flood in Brooklyn and is more concerned with his own needs and comforts than those of his parishioners. He goes to Tenerife ‘for five weeks every winter’ and does not want to do anything to rock the boat. Although he is S.B.’s friend, the Canon does nothing to bridge the obvious gap between Gar and his father. Gar believes that the priest should be able to ‘translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful buffoonery into Christian terms’ that would make life more bearable, but the ‘arid Canon’ remains silent. This could not be further from the case in Brooklyn: Father Flood goes out of his way to help Eilis financially, emotionally and spiritually.


There is something very bleak about the Canon’s refusal to become involved in what is undoubtedly a difficult situation. He has nothing to say but ‘Powerful the way time passes too’ when he hears Gar is leaving the following morning, even though it is obvious that there is great unhappiness in the O’Donnell household. However, religion is not portrayed as negatively in the play as in Never Let Me Go, in which the clones are seen as subhuman because those in authority find it convenient to say they have no souls. Religion in Philadelphia, Here I Come! is simply like every other aspect of the cultural context in the play: disappointing and depressing.


Family reflects the cultural context of each text.


Family life in the traditional sense does not exist in Never Let Me Go, and that is part of what makes this dystopian novel so bleak. The guardians in Hailsham double as parental figures to an extent but have none of the selfless, unconditional love of parents raising children in a family setting.


Despite their largely loveless upbringing, the students still long for the closeness that comes from a family. They turn to each other to form these bonds. Their relationships, which may have been merely close in a real boarding school, become incredibly important to them


Family is extremely important to the characters in the film Brooklyn and the roles of family members are far more typical than in the novel. While the clones have to turn to each other for the support a person would normally receive from parents and siblings, Eilis is fortunate to have a loving mother and sister, both of whom want the best for her. This is very different to the world of Never Let Me Go, in which the parental figures are ultimately raising their charges to donate their organs and die young.


Philadelphia, Here I Come! shares the view of the other two texts that family is important, but it presents us with a rather bleak depiction of the damage that can be caused by dysfunctional families. In Never Let Me Go, the clones create their own version of loving family life for the short time they can, and in Brooklyn, Eilis avails of a wide support network, but in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, family means pain, longing and loneliness. Gar, like Eilis, is faced with the choice between emigrating or staying with his elderly parent. The difference is that Eilis and her mother


416 King Lear and Comparatives


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