Friendship is an interesting thing – it is fickle and hard to find, yet true friends will stay for life. In Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, the three main characters, Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy, find themselves in an interesting friendship and eventual love triangle as they grow up at their boarding school, Hailsham, and mature into adults. Yet, no matter how disparate the three students are as adults contrasted to when they were students, certain themes stay true throughout their lives. One of these exemplars is the power dynamic between them. Most people find themselves on equal ground with their dearest friends, but this is not the case for Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy. The different friendship dynamics between Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy reveal that Ruth is at the top in terms of power, while Tommy and Kathy are at the bottom – creating an unhealthy relationship and environment for Kathy and Tommy to grow up in. Using this relationship, Ishiguro makes commentary on how friendship is not always magic but instead used to manipulate people.

In the students’ childhood, Ruth is in charge of Kathy’s friend group. She exerts her social influence over Kathy and Tommy in many situations to control them, providing an unhealthy and overcontrolled environment for them to grow up in. Kathy, when reminiscing about her childhood, describes a situation where Ruth and the rest of her friend group scorned her, yet stays loyal to Ruth because that was “the sort of loyalty she inspired in [Kathy] in those days” (Ishiguro, 55). Ishiguro portrays the skewed power dynamic between Kathy and Ruth clearly in just one sentence – Kathy is unfailingly loyal to Ruth despite Ruth’s actions, illustrating how she gave blind loyalty to Ruth. Ruth is charismatic, made clear by the phrase  “loyalty she inspired” which Kathy gives to her without question. Because of this, Kathy spends a significant part of her childhood following Ruth unfailingly. Additionally, Ruth lies to her friends to assert her own status as leader by claiming that one of the teachers, Miss Geraldine, showed her favor, “sometimes accompanied by a finger to the lips or a hand raised stage-whisper style” (Ishiguro, 57) in order to get her friends to keep the secret. By never claiming that the teachers showed her favor through speech, but instead through hinting actions and gestures, none of the group challenged her, and Ruth is able to use the ‘favor’ that a guardian bestowed upon her to elevate her position of power in the group. The teachers have authority, so when Ruth has their favor, she too gains prestige. Kathy is so loyal to Ruth that when she uncovers Ruth’s deception, she can’t understand why she tried “to upset [her] dearest friend” (Ishiguro 60) by proving Ruth a liar. Even when Kathy knows that Ruth is misleading her, Ruth retains her position of power over Kathy because Kathy refuses to put her lies out in the open, thus allowing Ruth to continue deceiving their friend group. If Kathy was to tell the rest of their friends, the girls would lose trust in Ruth, thus lessening her power and influence. Ishiguro uses this to demonstrate how Kathy is willing to push aside her morals for her friend, a Machiavellian relationship that happens in real life too. It is not just over Kathy that Ruth exerts power, but Tommy too, by disparaging him and calling him a “mad animal” (Ishiguro, 12). Through his childhood, she exerts the control of a bully over Tommy by gossiping about him behind his back to her friends, while simultaneously establishing her position of greater power by calling him an animal, a word used to refer to a creature that is less than human. Thus, throughout their childhood, Ruth establishes her dominance over Kathy and Tommy, an injurious dominance that continues into adulthood.

In their adolescence, Ruth still retains her position of power by ingratiating herself with the older children in order to push herself to higher social ground. While staying at the cottages with experienced veterans, “[Ruth] was struggling to become someone else” (Ishiguro, 130), an observation Kathy makes as Ruth tries to integrate herself with the veterans. The veterans have almost the same social position in the Cottages as the guardians at Hailsham – they are older, knowledgeable, and have been there longer. Ruth integrating herself with them is another way that she elevates her position of power, mimicking her actions at Hailsham. As the teenagers grow into young adults, Ruth increases her power in the friendship by “pretending to forget things about Hailsham” (Ishiguro, 189). By doing so, she makes herself seem older and less childish, as Hailsham was their childhood. Using the age dynamic where older people have more influence and power, Ruth was able to further her position in the friend group, and as such also ingratiate herself with the veterans, who had never been to Hailsham before. For example, “when [Kathy] said to the veterans, by way of explanation” (Ishiguro, 189), that she was talking about their guardians, “Ruth [gave] a frowning nod” (Ishiguro, 189), and Kathy inadvertently treated Ruth the same way as the rest of the veterans, who the students saw as older and more powerful, thus elevating Ruth to a position of influence in her mind. In the process, Ruth also pushes away their shared past and at the same time their bonds of friendship, leaving them in the dust for bigger and better things while still keeping them with her. Ruth’s position towards Tommy stays the same as in their childhood, treating Tommy as though he is lesser and depreciating him. For example, she discredits his ideas and tells him not to “make a fool of [himself] in front of [their] friend” (Ishiguro, 193), Kathy, even when he is just expressing his ideas and looking for support. By separating Kathy and Tommy from one another through the act of telling Tommy to not “make a fool of himself”, she also separates the two of them and further reduces their power. The only new part of the relationship is that she insults and patronizes him in front of him, calling him things like “Sweet Boy” and “sweety gums” (Ishiguro, 193). As such, a pattern develops of Ruth putting herself above her two friends in terms of power, an unhealthy dynamic that didn’t make for a healthy childhood. He also sets aside the manipulative actions of Ruth in the same way that Kathy does because of friendship, only it is because of romance. In the process, the friendship has shaped them in ways they won’t be able to get rid of – something Ishiguro uses to help demonstrate some of the dangers of friendship.

Moving forward into adulthood, this uneven, toxic power structure continues to reign, even after she dies, demonstrating how ingrained her influence is. This hierarchy is slightly different – Ruth shows herself to have a strong influence on them and the decisions they make, but does not publicly control them. Kathy, for example, as a vaunted carer, gets to choose who she cares for; when she realizes that “Ruth didn’t trust [her]” (Ishiguro, 215) she continues as Ruth’s carer anyway– a decision spawned less from a sense of responsibility or obligation and more from Kathy’s deeply rooted habit of sticking with Ruth no matter what. The most notable indicator of this is in a conversation Kathy and Tommy have after Ruth dies, when Kathy states “[that her staying as Tommy’s carer and building a life with him was] what Ruth wanted too” (Ishiguro, 280). Yet, Tommy argues that “Ruth wanted the other thing for us” and that “Ruth would have understood” (Ishiguro, 281) in terms of Kathy and Tommy splitting ways after their deferral doesn’t work out. Their statements are not about what they want, but rather what Ruth would have wanted. This indicates how much Ruth affected the two of them, and how ingrained the power dynamic is in Tommy and Kathy. Even after she dies, what Ruth would have hypothetically wanted has a huge impact on the two adults, who base and justify their decisions off of what she would have wanted over their own opinions. It also demonstrates how the two are unable to escape her influence because of how deep it runs. Ishiguro uses this to comment on how formative friendship can be – because they grew up in that environment, it shaped them in ways that Ruth has marked them forever. Thus, even in death, the imbalanced hierarchy between Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy remains through adulthood.

Throughout the novel, it is evident how the power dynamics between Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy tilt in Ruth’s favor, something that stays true from their beginning moments at Hailsham to her death and lives as adult donors and carers. This affects Tommy and Kathy in a harmful way because of how unhealthy a childhood they have and how much influence Ruth has even after she is dead, with Ruth still dictating their actions in. Ishiguro weaves a compelling, heartbreaking tale in Never Let Me Go, using the friendships and power dynamics between the three friends to show how habits learned in childhood stay until adulthood for Kathy and Tommy, staying loyal to Ruth even when she is manipulative. Ishiguro uses Never Let Me Go to write about a more cynical take on friendship – one where friendship leaves people open to manipulation, digs deep into them and doesn’t let go, and causes them to compromise their morals.  Friendship is a powerful force – if Kathy and Tommy had a better friend, one who wasn’t so controlling and mentally “above” them, would they have turned out differently?

Works Cited

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Faber, 2006.

Paull, J. Personal Interview, 24 May 2019.

Renaker, T. Personal Interview, 20 May 2019.

Willrich, S. Personal Interview, 23 May 2019.