Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
[...] Interesting, but I don't find it analogous. There's a huge difference between living somewhere with an average low life expectancy, and, in our book, knowing you are going to be chopped up on an operating table and die because of it. One is a maybe, the other is a certainty. And I'm sure that some people do move out of Glasgow; none of the clones try to escape.
|
From that Glasgow effect link: "The higher mortality is fueled by stroke, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer, along with deaths caused by alcohol, drugs, violence and suicide." So there's probably going to at least some getting chopped up - on and off operating tables.
It may be that donation is done in stages precisely so the clones don't have an exact date of death - giving the impression of uncertainty. No one knows how many donations they might make before completion. (We all know we're going to die, we only have uncertainty about when.)
And the clones, like Glasgow, have decades of history behind their situation. Things tend to look different from the inside, when that's all you've ever known. This is what the book is asking you to accept, that the situation exists for whatever reason; the technicalities are irrelevant to the narrator whose life we are remembering.
How do we know that none of the clones ever try to escape? All we have is the inherently unreliable first-person account of one clone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Rather than passivity, I would have liked to see in the clones an exaggerated sense of altruism. Suppose they'd been taught to be self-sacrificing and noble, to feel they were performing a great service to humanity--which they are. I think that would have been a lot more interesting, but there's nothing to support it in the novel.
|
And here you have me puzzled. What is not noble and self-sacrificing about the lives of these clones? Isn't self-sacrifice the sum total of their lives after going into training to be a career? Isn't going forward into that, without complaint, and with quiet dignity, noble? (We might except, perhaps, Tommy and Kathy who are asking for a delay, but it's still only a delay that they request, not a full escape.)
Even if you don't like my examples of innate human passivity, isn't it likely (or at least possible) that the clones' passivity is partly the result of being told from the start that their lives are of a great service to humanity? I see nothing to deny that in the novel. On the contrary, that the clones move voluntarily from the cottages into training, and then from caring into donation, seems to be evidence that this is how they see their lives. The fact that they don't make a big deal over this self-sacrifice (maybe reciting Dickens' "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done" as they stride to the operating table) is part of the quiet dignity I indicated, and all the more noble for it. I can imagine that if you tried to tell them they didn't have to do it, they would look at you as if you were crazy.
We have religions and cults created by people searching for a purpose in their life, and some cults happily sacrifice their lives for their beliefs. Here in this story the clones have their purpose handed to them with their earliest education. I think it was Aristotle that was supposed to have said: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man."