A Rhetorical Approach to Narrative Unreliability in Never Let Me Go

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of unreliability in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro deploying the rhetorical approach to narratives - which conceives of narratives as a purposive communicative act - and a range of signifiers and signifieds as defined by Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. By contrasting two possible readings of this book, i.e. its common reading as a dystopian novel vs the author’s recommendation of reading it as an allegorical novel, one has the possibility to nuance the issue of reliability.