English

‘Death meant very little’. Discuss how the novels Never Let Me Go and The Cement Garden explore different responses to death.
Despite the idea of death being a momentous important theme of both novels; The Cement garden and Never Let Me go it is portrayed in them as an infinitesimal subject even though its power and significance in society is monumental, instead it is simply disregarded of having any valuation and ultimately diminished of sensitivity. Never Let Me Go focuses on how students who will be future donors react on their planned impending deaths while The Cement Garden explores how children cope with early deaths of their figures of responsibility and authority.
Ian McEwan expounds how the children handle death of there parents in The Cement Garden in distinctive & distinguished behaviours Jacks becomes increasingly isolated and acts in odd eccentric manners by not washing himself he describes the smell on his hands as being like ‘the meat we had thrown out’ arguably this is because of the lack of authority around him he starts growing animalistic characteristics because he has little guidance of what is right and wrong. He also excessively masturbates which is a grieving method for him to take his mind off his losses as he cannot properly process the situation; Jack consciously states how he ‘masturbates each morning and afternoon’, the deaths were so abnormal & unplanned in the way his thinking pattern would have foreseen the future to have originally been that he does not understand it and so falls into a state of renunciation; because of this his interpretation of what is important in principle is distorted which explains why he positions his first masturbation as a ‘landmark ’ however when speaking about the death of his father illustrates it as something with minor significance here a Oedipus complex is created in the sense that his father’s death was the cost for his sexual awakening.
Never Let Me Go is alike in the perception of   that...