The Clones’ Apprenticeship: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a Bildungsroman

This article considers as a Bildungsroman the 2005 novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which depicts the education of young clones in a boarding school in a 1990s uchronic England. It studies the main theoretical works about this type of writing in order to isolate some of its defining characteristics and then evaluate the possibility of an analogy between the fictional developments of humans and clones. It concludes that, even though the Bildunsgroman has strong ties with the changing nineteenth-century society, it has been adapted to other – even non-existing – environments.