The Banality of Evil in Never Let Me Go

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world may have disagreed with the donations, they did not try to stop it because it benefited them, or could’ve benefited them. When Tommy and Kathy go to visit Madame they are told, “ Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This is what people noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere.” (Ishiguro 262) People were ignoring the fact that several hundreds of people were being killed just because in benefited them, which this concept is frightening because it isn’t very different than events that have happened in history which makes it more realistic and terrifying. The publics reaction and the donations themselves tie in to the concept of the banality of evil; people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like these donations, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their situation and participate in these actions without really questioning it. The Holocaust is a good example of the banality of evil and an example of the public not really doing anything. Officers in the Nazi army carried out orders of killing millions of people, but the officers weren’t crazy they were just accepting the premises of their situation and doing evil things and killing people. Similar to the officers the public didn’t really question it and even if it wasn’t benefiting them the same way as the donations benefited the public in the novel. The realistic nature of the public avoiding the thought of killing people just because it benefited them is another aspect of this novel that makes it so horrific.

In the novel, Never Let Me Go, the frighteningly realistic world where clones are created for the sole purpose of going through a series of donations where all their major organs are harvested is realistic in the aspects of people being killed specifically for organ donation, the cultish nature go Hailsham and how the students behaved because of it, how the outside world did nothing to stop the donations because it benefited them, and the idea of the banality of evil how it isn’t crazy people that are doing horrific things but common people doing evil things, which are all aspects of the novel that make it both frightening and horrific.