Character Analysis
Characters as Constructs
In the OCR exam, you must analyse characters as constructs — deliberate creations serving Ishiguro’s thematic purposes. Use the phrase “Ishiguro presents [character] as…” to signal AO2 awareness.
Kathy H.
Kathy is the narrator and our window into the clone world. Her voice is calm, digressive and emotionally restrained. She rarely expresses anger or outrage. Key quotation: “My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.” The flat, matter-of-fact opening establishes her acceptance of a horrifying reality. Her narration is an act of memorialisation — by telling her story, she ensures that Tommy, Ruth and Hailsham are remembered.
Kathy’s restraint mirrors the clones’ conditioning. She does not rage because she has been raised not to. Yet her narration itself is resistance: by telling the story, she asserts her humanity. The gap between the horror of what she describes and the calmness with which she describes it is Ishiguro’s most powerful technique.
Tommy D.
Tommy is the novel’s emotional heart. His childhood rages — mocked for his inability to create art — are his only form of instinctive rebellion. His desperate hope in the deferral myth, his tiny animal drawings, and his final scream into the darkness make him the most overtly tragic character. Tommy represents the human need for hope and the devastation of its loss.
Ruth
Ruth is possessive, manipulative and deeply insecure. She mimics TV behaviour, blocks the Kathy-Tommy relationship and lies about her ambitions. Yet Ishiguro makes her sympathetic too: Ruth’s performance is a desperate attempt to construct an identity in a world that denies her one. Her confession after her first donation, that she kept Kathy and Tommy apart, reveals genuine love beneath the manipulation.
Miss Emily is Hailsham’s headteacher and the novel’s most morally complex adult. She genuinely believed she was giving clones a better life, but she also maintained the system that killed them. Her speech to Kathy and Tommy is both an apology and a self-justification. Madame is repulsed by the clones despite campaigning for their rights — her tears when she sees Kathy dancing to “Never Let Me Go” suggest deep, conflicted emotion. Miss Lucy is the only guardian who tells the truth directly, and she is fired for it. Together, these three represent different responses to moral complicity: justification (Emily), guilt (Madame) and rebellion (Lucy).
Miss Emily: justification (‘we did the best we could’). Madame: guilt (physically repulsed, secretly compassionate). Miss Lucy: rebellion (tells the truth, is fired). Ishiguro uses these three to explore how individuals respond to systems they know are wrong but feel powerless to change.
Character Relationships
The Kathy-Tommy-Ruth triangle drives the plot. Ruth positions herself between Kathy and Tommy out of insecurity. Kathy defers to Ruth out of loyalty. Tommy is passive, allowing Ruth to control the relationship. This pattern reflects the clones’ wider passivity — they do not fight for what they want, whether in love or in life. Ruth’s confession breaks this pattern, but too late.
Readers often find the characters’ passivity frustrating. But this is Ishiguro’s point. The clones have been conditioned from birth to accept their role. Their passivity is not a character flaw — it is the result of systematic dehumanisation. Ishiguro uses the clones’ compliance to ask whether “normal” humans are any different: do we not also accept unjust systems (poverty, inequality, environmental destruction) with the same quiet resignation?
Each character embodies a different response to mortality: Kathy accepts (through narration), Tommy hopes (through art) and then rages (the scream), Ruth performs (mimicry) and then confesses. These responses map onto real human strategies for coping with death — acceptance, denial, distraction, honesty.
Kathy: acceptance through narration. Tommy: hope (art) then rage (scream). Ruth: performance and distraction, then honesty at the end. Miss Emily: justification. Madame: guilt. Miss Lucy: truth-telling. These responses to mortality are Ishiguro’s real subject.