Too little Too late

Of all the characters in this novel, Tommy and Kathy were clearly the ones who were supposed to have been together all along.  They just acknowledged this fact a little too late.  I loved the recurring event that took place when Tommy had a tantrum on page 274.  It was just like the one he had had at Hailsham, and Kathy had been looking out for him then too.  Both instances were muddy, and Tommy got some one himself.  Kathy was there to comfort him both times.  This second time, however, she was able to show her love for him.  She held him until he stopped fighting himself, as she wanted to have done back at Hailsham but had stopped herself from doing so.  Kathy and Tommy, even from childhood, had always cared about the other.  In the end, Tommy puts it perfectly.  "'It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives'" (Ishiguro, 282).  They put this love into action too late; they were out of time.

Let's make a deal

I know I've touched upon this before, but I can't get over how callous these people are to something like sex!  I can understand it a little more when it was Kathy and some random guys at the cottages.  But she lovedTommy, and even that she made seem like it was some business transaction!  Kathy doesn't say that she and Tommy had sex because she loved him, because she was ready and she wanted to.  In her words, it was because "if our plans went along the lines Ruth had wanted, and we did find ourselves going for a deferral, it might prove a real drawback if we'd never had sex" (Ishiguro, 238).  How romantic?  It would have been an inconvenience for them to not have had sex when they approached Madame, so they might as well get it over with, right?  I just don't understand that.  Miss Emily said they used the kids' art to determine whether or not they had souls.  Maybe they should also have taken into account whether or not they had any remote feelings of reverence for sex or love for the one they were having sex with!

The tin[wo]man does have a heart

I'm not backing down from my previous statements about Ruth.  I don't like her, not then and not now. However, in her weaker, somewhat dying, days, she showed what appeared to be actually remorse for her past actions.  "'I'd like you to forgive me, but i don't expect you to.  Anyway, that's not the half of it, not even a small bit of it...The main thing is, I kept you and Tommy apart" (Ishiguro, 232).  Ruth was like a selfish older sister to Kathy for most of their lives.  Tommy was her toy.  Even if she didn't care about him much, even if she didn't want to play with him, she did NOT want Kathy having him.  For that reason, she would hold onto that toy no matter what, out of pure spite.  At least, though, in the end, Ruth acknowledges the fact that she had done wrong.  She admitted to having kept two people who clearly loved each other apart.  What I don't understand is why Tommy didn't dump her snotty butt long before that point so that he could be with Kathy instead!

Kathy can do no right

Even now that they're older, it seems that there is nothing Kathy can do that wouldn't annoy Ruth.  She makes Kathy feel guilty about the fact that she is still a carer.  Ruth HATED being a carer!  She couldn't wait to get her notice for donations, but that didn't matter.  Kathy had something that Ruth didn't, and Kathy was good at it; that's enough to make Ruth bitter towards her.  At one point, Kathy is trying to console Ruth, when Ruth retorts with "'How would you know?  How could you possibly know?  You're still a carer" (Ishiguro, 226).  It's like she can't live if she's not belittling or cutting down Kathy; it's like oxygen to her.  I think, in this instance, part of Ruth's classic hostility towards Kathy is misdirected.  I think She's scared that, when she dies, Tommy wouldn't be very much affected just as Rodney supposedly wasn't devastated by Chrissie's completion.  Either way, I think Ruth is bitter that Kathy has not yet had to shoulder the burdens of being a donor.

Cloning and such

I've been noticing more and more that Ishiguro likes to randomly drop these bombs in mid-sentence throughout his work.  We go through the first half of the book only knowing that the students are special and different in some way, but never know exactly why.  And then Ishiguro just slips into a random sentence that, oh hey, they're clones.  No big deal, right?  Is that the reason they can't have babies even if they wanted to?  For Kathy and her peers, wondering about or looking for their possibles must feel similar to an adopted child searching for his birth parents.  It must be terrifying.  On one hand, you have to be dying to know who they are, what they're like, in what ways you're like them.  But, on the other, it has to be absolutely terrifying!  They would have spent their whole lives wondering about these people and dreaming them up to be these kind of legends in their minds.  What if they, by chance, meet their model and are devastated by what they see?  "Our models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that" (Ishiguro, 140).  The students try to act like they really don't care about who their models are, but deep down, they all do.

Never letting go

As I read through section two, I came across a longer quote that held a lot of meaning to me, as well as it did for Kathy.  "Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought.  Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and---no matter how much we despised ourselves for it---unable quite to let each other go"  (Ishiguro, 120).  I feel like I will have the same feeling towards many of my classmates in the coming month.  Right now, there are many of them that I'll be very glad to get away from.  But, in reality, they are part of who I am.  I will never be able to let the people go, the ends that I've spent the past four years of my life with.  Like Kathy, I think we all like to think that we'll be independent.  We like Ito think that we'll be able to shake off the people of our past once we move on to the next phase of our lives.  But, like Kathy realized in this quote, they will be a part of us forever; there is no letting them go.

Two-faced Ruth

The more I read about Ruth, the more I can't stand her!  Everything about her is shallow, petty, and two-faced, and I can't understand how or why anyone would want to be friends with her.  For one thing, she is annoyingly condescending to Kathy.  "So that's it, that's what's upsetting poor little Kathy.  Ruth isn't paying enough attention to her..." (Ishiguro, 124).  She is a social climber who only treats Kathy well when she can get something out of it.  Kathy even acknowledges the fact that Ruth is a two-faced person.  "There was one Ruth who was always trying to impress the veterans, who wouldn't hesitate to ignore me, Tommy, any of the others, if she thought we'd cramp her style...But the Ruth who sat beside me in my little attic room...that was the Ruth from Hailsham" (Ishiguro, 129).  There is someone in my life that is scarily similar to Ruth's characteristics.  The difference between me and Kathy, though, is that I don't sit aside and let someone treat me like dirt.  I hope Kathy eventually goes off on Kathy for her shallowness.