A Study of Comparing A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man with Never Let Me Go from Post-human Perspective: Focusing on the Format of Bildungsroman

This article compares Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go focusing on the dismantling of the dichotomy, which is a key element of post-humanism. Joyce not only coined the term ‘post-human,’ but also the pivotal theme of his texts is the dismantlement of the dichotomy, which can lead to connect Joyce’s literature with post-humanism. Furthermore, there is a noticeable common element between the two texts: making use of the format of Bildungsroman. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man depicts Stephen’s journey from his childhood to becoming a university student and in Never Let Me Go Kathy narrates her experience of the growth from school years at Hailsham to her adulthood, when she works as a carer in the human society. This paper uses a post-human perspective as its primary analytical tool to compare two texts, focusing on how each text effectively makes use of the format of Bildungsroman in order to dismantle the dichotomy of human and non-human or that of the mind and body.