ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

I missed the party but:

I'm curious what you would say about Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This novel is set in a society which is just enough like our own that the similarities invite you to assume as you're reading that you're looking at our world. It was written like a diary, and because the character writing it is writing it for herself, she doesn't clarify certain important details of the society she lives in until halfway through the book. So it all seems more and more mysterious as you hear about her memories of her childhood, where she grew up and various interactions with adults, until finally she happens to mention the day she first fully understood her role in the world she lives in, and explicitly spells it out.

This narrator seems tricky to classify because she's never lying or concealing anything on purpose; but she's also writing in a way that assumes that any reader (in her mind, herself, or maybe others from her world) would understand the context of her story.

What do you think? Does she qualify as an unconscious indecipherable during the first half of the book? Or is she in a separate category?