Unveiling the Truth About Hailsham Essay - 886 Words

Kazuo Ishiguro does an excellent job in explaining the conditions of Hailsham in his book Never Let Me Go, and it is only through Kathy’s life experience and curiosity that a reader might get a sense of what Hailsham really is about. Kathy frequently brings up Hailsham through-out the whole book, and the reader gets the sense that Hailsham played an integral role in the future of her and her classmates’ lives. The memories, although sometimes good and bad, cannot be fathomed by most people as being comfortable or even humane. It is, ultimately, the thought of what lies behind the existence of Hailsham that really startles its readers into realizing the full extent of the emptiness and doom that†¦show more content†¦It is the theme that states the children do not have the right to question their future. But it goes further than that; the real teaching of Hailsham is to stop the children from questioning anything that is taught to them at all. It is proved when K athy expresses surprise at the fact that they had to prove that they had souls in the first place, and Miss Emily cruelly responds, â€Å"It’s touching, Kathy, to see you so taken aback. It demonstrates, in a way, that we did our job well† (Ishiguro 260). Miss Emily’s statements are highly disturbing, and would be taken offensively by any person that just realized that they have been manipulated all their lives. However, this is not the case with these children, and by Kathy’s lack of response to that highly provocative statement shows that the children were in fact, abused and deceived by a school that has no respect for life at all. In a way these children are like pigs led to the slaughter. The practice of deceit and the conniving structural ways of Hailsham is displayed once again through a system that Kathy refers to as the â€Å"Sales† (Ishiguro 41). The Sales is a system where the children â€Å"got a hold of things from the outside† by using their hard earned tokens to purchase these items (Ishiguro 41). The children would get â€Å"excited† at the sight of the â€Å"big white van† that brought them â€Å"clothes, toys, and the special things that hadn’t been