Replacements: How Humans Lost Their Value

There is no real value to things if everything can be replaced.

 A person loses its uniqueness and individuality if it can be easily replaced by someone else. An object loses its meaning if once it is lost it can be replaced. Everything is valued the same if it can easily be restored by replacements. Thus, nothing is held to a higher standard. This lack of value and abundance of replacements can be seen in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, where both humans and clones have lost their value. 

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The main argument in the book is that clones are valued less than humans. Ishiguro points out, frequently, that the clones were only made to donate their organs, and that most people neither consider them as part of society nor as humans. Consequently, most of humanity wishes to keep the clone's existence hidden and belittle their worth. A character in the book, Miss Emily, says something that agrees with this statement, 

“So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter."(263)

In Ishiguro's world, all the people wanted from the clones were their organs. They didn't care for or acknowledge the clones who provided them. Consequently, in that same scene in the book, Miss Emily says, "people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere..."(262).  The humans in the book preferred to accept the organs without acknowledging the responsibility of knowing where they came from. Therefore, instead of accepting them, when humanity found out the organs came from the clones, they denounced them making themselves the higher species. The humans made their lives more valuable than the lives of the clones condemning them to be the lesser species doomed to die. 

Adding insult to injury, the clones, were as the book puts it, “modelled from trash"(166). They believed they were  based on “junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps…"(166), which only helps emphasize their situation further. The midset imposed on the clones' minds was carefully placed there to keep them in check. Ishiguro makes a point to explicitly state that the clones are viewed as less than humans.

The clones in Never Let Me Go will never be seen or treated as humans, because they are not humans but replacements of them. 

The viewing of the clones as replacements for humans may be true, but it also undermines the level of importance and value that humans have of themselves since they can be replaced at any moment by a clone. Thus, if there is an easiness with which clones can be made after humans, then why is one thought of lesser than the other? Why are humans held to a higher standard than their identical, genetically-made counterparts? 

The book portrays the decline of value at the hands of replacements when it mentions Kathy's tape. Kathy, at Norfolk, decides to look for her lost Judy Bridgewater tape. When she and Tommy find a replacement in an antique shop, she says, "Judy Bridgewater. My old friend. It's like she's never been away"(180). With this quote, Kathy undermines the general thought that replacements do not have an equal value to the worth of the original object. The book expands on the idea that the new tape easily replaces the old one, and it demonstrates this with Kathy's indifference to her ownership of either one.

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If the book itself says that replacements have the same value as the original object, then why do we not see that same idea presented with the clones? The problem with the clones arises out of the fear of the people and their innate belief that the clones could replace humans and even have superior abilities that surpass them. The present fear is what leads humans to fixate on their feeling of superiority and mistreating of the clones. 

The feeling of superiority that arose from this fear is virtually nonexistent since the clones have adapted to be at the same level as humans. The clones have proven many times that they are easily educated. There is even mention of a series of "children demonstrably superior"(264) to the humans. So, if the clones need humans to educate them in life and humans require the clones for their organs, then doesn't that eliminate any sort of superiority of one from the other?

What this situation presents is codependency from humans, which is never addressed in the book. The humans obviously need the clones to provide for their makeshift life extensions. However, no amount of belittling and ignoring will erase the fact that without the clones the humans wouldn't experience their pretend immortality. On the other hand, the clones do not require the common people since they are shown to be easily adaptable and superior at times. The codependency coming from the humans towards the clones is gone unspoken for and unaddressed. Consequently, out of this codependency arises the fear towards the clones, and how they could effortlessly replace humans in an instant. 

 The fragile line between the clones replacing the humans and being better than them is never addressed. Still, this information alludes to the fact that humans are not better than clones. If humans could be so easily replaced, then there is no basis for them feeling superior to the clones. The feeling of superiority that humans have in the book is bogus and annulled by the existence of the clones as their replacements. 

Both the humans and the clones in Never Let Me Go have lost their value because, aside from the fact that they need each other, they can also replace each other. Clones are not needed aside from their organs, and humans can be easily replaced by clones, which means that neither one holds value over the other. Going back to the example of Kathy's tape, both of her tapes lost its meaning with the existence of the other. The same could be applied to the clones and humans, who both have lost their value because of the existence of the other and the situation they are placed in. 

There is no real value to both the humans and the clones in Never Let Me Go because both can be easily replaced by the other.

The topic of replacements in Never Let Me Go can be seen with many different perspectives. I think the idea that the clones are replacements not only for organs but for the humans lessens the human's uniqueness and thus their value. The clones are presented as nothing special, which is only made to provide organs, but as the story goes, we come to learn that they could become more advanced than humans. Consequently, not humans nor clones have an edge over the other. They are both placed at the same level and have lost equally their value and superiority over each other.