[Catlady]

Originally Posted by gmw

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's not definite. What happens to the clones IS definite.

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.)

Except that four donations seems to be the max. And once the operations start, they are going to be operated on repeatedly and suffer until they die.

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.

But once they become carers, they are no longer in the tightly controlled environment. They see firsthand what is going to happen to them. They know there's a different world--e.g., the world represented by Ruth's office. When they go looking for her possible, the two veterans are already wanting a way out, even before the carer stage , so clearly they are not totally resigned to their fate.

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.

Why is she an "inherently unreliable" narrator? If you believe that, well, we could take it to an absurd level and say she made up the whole story of the clones and she's actually a delusional mental patient. I think with all her years as a carer, she'd know about escape attempts if any happened.

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.

<snip>

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."

Nothing to deny it, and nothing to support it. NONE of this is in the novel. Is there even a throwaway line about serving humanity? About this group of children having a special calling? About them being trained for a noble undertaking? About them being hailed as heroes after they die? That kind of Kool-Aid could have a powerful effect on children but the author says nothing about it.