The Limits of Empathy and Human Rights in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
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This essay examines the ways in which Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go destabilizes the interrelated notions of empathy and human rights by analyzing ruptures in emotional identification. Charged with intense feelings such as love, fear, distress, sadness, joy, and anger, Never Let Me Go is a very affective text that invites readers to participate in the feelings only to foreground the limits of empathy. In Never Let Me Go, feelings are misread rather than shared, and what has been believed to be empathy turns out to be a fantasy. Claiming human rights presupposes not only autonomous but empathetic individuals who are capable of making independent moral judgments and empathizing with others. If empathy, as Lynn Hunt posits, is a basis for human rights, then Ishiguro’s novel forces us to think about the rights of those who bear witness to the failure of empathy. Never Let Me Go does not offer any alternative to empathy in a straightforward way after exposing its limits. Instead, it makes readers uncomfortable, perplexed, and uneasy by revealing how incompetent and self-contradictory our idea of human rights is. In this way, Never Let Me Go makes us feel bad and asks us to take a long hard look at our negative feelings rather than converting them to humanizing emotions, drawing attention to the value of bad feelings.
Abstract
This essay examines the ways in which Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go destabilizes the interrelated notions of empathy and human rights by analyzing ruptures in emotional identification. Charged with intense feelings such as love, fear, distress, sadness, joy, and anger, Never Let Me Go is a very affective text that invites readers to participate in the feelings only to foreground the limits of empathy. In Never Let Me Go, feelings are misread rather than shared, and what has been believed to be empathy turns out to be a fantasy. Claiming human rights presupposes not only autonomous but empathetic individuals who are capable of making independent moral judgments and empathizing with others. If empathy, as Lynn Hunt posits, is a basis for human rights, then Ishiguro’s novel forces us to think about the rights of those who bear witness to the failure of empathy. Never Let Me Go does not offer any alternative to empathy in a straightforward way after exposing its limits. Instead, it makes readers uncomfortable, perplexed, and uneasy by revealing how incompetent and self-contradictory our idea of human rights is. In this way, Never Let Me Go makes us feel bad and asks us to take a long hard look at our negative feelings rather than converting them to humanizing emotions, drawing attention to the value of bad feelings.
참고문헌 (16)
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