NRJ#2 – Relationship

               In our life circle there are many people in which we associate ourselves with, people in which we have a relationship.  Not referring to just two people in love or dating as our view of a relationship, but the way in which an individual relates to another.  Ishiguro uses setting and symbolism to show how a relationship is affected when means by which the associations forming the relationship are dissolved.  All of the Hailsham students share a common bond on the simple association of having attended Hailsham.  We get this feeling early on when Kathy states, “I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham”(5).  Now that she has been allowed to choose her own donors to care for she begins to seek out those who she can relate to.  Her closeness to Ruth was a result of, according to Kathy, “the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham” (5).  Hailsham became a place where the students could form relationships from their experiences while attending Hailsham.  Unlike the other donor who relish the memories and ties Kathy and the other Hailsham students had, Kathy and the others took solace in the place that gave them such memories.  Hailsham as a “boarding school” had provided a place for the clones to be reared as close to normal children as possible.  By Hailsham being a place for the student to feeling interact allowed for the formation of relationships one with another.  This becomes most evident when we learn of the closing of Hailsham.  Kathy compares a handful of balloons held by a clown to the individuals of Hailsham and with the news of the closing, “it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon string just where they entwined above the man’s fist.  Once this happened there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other anymore” (213).  With Hailsham gone so was the tie in which all Hailsham student had been linked one with another.  Left to just memories of what it was like we see a fading in their relationship that reflect the dissolved associations that Hailsham once brought.  This is evident in the conversation Kathy has with Laura, walking by Laura Kathy states, “I was tempted to ignore her and keep walking” (209).  Laura was a close friend of Kathy’s while at Hailsham, and with their conversation being very dull and since leaving Hailsham and its closing, the desire to remember or talk about Hailsham appears burdensome, Kathy states, “Maybe we both felt there was something dangerous about bringing up the old days, because for ages we avoided any mention of hem” (209).  Later we see a distancing of even the closest friends: Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy following the departure of Hailsham.  Little by little as they have left the place that brought them such memories and all it stood for, their ability to relate to one another fell upon their current state, which state only moved them away from each other.