Most dystopian novels focus on the characters who rebel and fight back against the system, but what made Never Let Me Go so poignant to me was that it focused on characters that had been so thoroughly brainwashed that their only hopes were to ask for special consideration within the system, refusal and running away never even occurred to them as an option that was open to them. We the reader can see that maybe they could have tried to run away and blend in with normal society, but instead the characters pretty much accepted the inevitability of their fate every step of the way. Even at the end of the novel Kathy is pretty dispassionate about letting her fantasy of Tommy go too far, she just ends it and goes to where she's "supposed to be". For me what makes it so effective is how the clones are brainwashed into accepting their fate, they have such small fantasies about working in an office or getting an extra three years to be together, but in the end it doesn't occur to even Tommy (who would throw tantrums all the time when he was younger) to really fight back

To me it had a lot of parallels to oppressive human systems like slavery, while there were always some that tried to run or tried to lead uprisings against their oppressors, the vast majority did think that they had no choice but to go along with the way that things were. I thought that it was really interesting and sad to get a story from that perspective, as opposed to the usual narrator raging about the unfairness of life in these sorts of stories

I liked the film adaption of it too, Carey Mulligan was especially good as Kathy I thought. Urgh it was really hard for me to get through the scene where Tommy and Kathy are asking Madame for a deferral though, I was crying so hard when Tommy got all of his pictures out and was so hopeful :(