“Living Under the Shadow”: The Production and Internalization of Spatial Fear in Never Let Me Go

Abstract

This article examines the mechanisms of affective governance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, focusing on how spatial fear is produced by mainstream society and subsequently internalized by the clones. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotion, Michel Foucault’s panopticism, and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the camp, the study argues that fear is not a natural emotion but a carefully engineered political technology. Through external spatial segregation, internal architectural division, and the circulation of horror narratives, mainstream society constructs fear as a means of boundary-making and population control. The second part demonstrates how clones internalize this fear through emotional orientation, bodily practices, and narrative absorption, transforming externally imposed boundaries into mechanisms of self-surveillance. The novel thus illuminates a subtle yet effective form of biopolitical power that operates through the management and distribution of fear.