Kasuo Ishiguro's inhuman distopia

Abstract

Listening in the healthcare sector is essential. Anamnesis or the “patient's story”, fundamental in medical work-up, consists of an interview with a health professional designed to obtain important elements for the diagnosis from the suffering subject. It is a brief and pragmatic biographical text, often converted into a standardized questionnaire, but which does not escape a degree of interpretative elaboration on the part of the interviewer. This reflects the trend towards mechanization of health care, where the distancing of the agents involved in the consultation compromises the possibility of a genuine dialogue between them, which can lead to an imbalance of power, with the predominance of the best equipped over the most vulnerable. In extreme situations, this asymmetry can lead to mechanisms of dehumanization, such as that denounced in the science fiction novel Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, where the intimate narrative of a caregiver in a hospital environment becomes a moving and inadvertent document of denunciation of the submission and silence of the subjects called “patients”, that is, in a fragile condition and without a voice. In this article, we use bioethics references (Chambers, Charon, Frank, Hayles) to discuss the narrative Medicine approach in this story, which aligns with the Science Fiction genre by speculatively problematizing the theme of human cloning.