Miss Lucy

Kazuo Ishiguro does a great job of building the suspense behind the character of Miss Lucy in Never Let Me Go. As I read, the speaker leaves a series of cliffhangers at the end of chapters and at the end of story-breaks right before the little symbol. The speaker likes to tell many stories within stories over and over again. What I noticed is that many of these memories have to do with Miss Lucy. She seems as if she is a major character and has a major influence on many aspects of the plot.

Miss Lucy is a character that seems to be uneasy about the way things are run at Hailsham. The way she speaks to her classes, she gives the impression that she feels as if the students are treated unfairly in terms of being fully aware of their futures. It seems very convenient that right after Miss Lucy is extremely blunt to a whole crowd of students at the pavilion that rainy day about their futures, she is no longer a guardian there. My guess is that Miss Emily was not so keen on the idea of the students thinking too deeply about what is awaiting them in the future. There are many secrets that the students are too embarrassed to further pursue; however, the students are told everything. The problem is when they are told. When Miss Lucy tells the crows that they have been "told but not told" (Ishiguro, 81), she proves Tommy's idea that, "the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information" (Ishiguro, 82). Miss Lucy then went on to tell them all information that they had already known; however, hearing it now, it was bound to sink in since they were older.

Another thing about Miss Lucy that puzzles me still is her relationship with Tommy. Towards the beginning of the novel, she helps Tommy through some of his struggles by telling him not to worry about not being creative and that maybe he is just a late bloomer. Because she was so genuinely passionate about this response to pull Tommy aside and reassure him about his creativity, that's why I was so confused when she took it all back. She explains that being creative is a big part of the next steps in their futures and that being physically fit isn't enough.