Memory Under Control: Visibility, Omission, and Informational Governance in Never Let Me Go and The Memory Police

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (2019) explore how memory is shaped within systems that regulate what can be remembered and forgotten. This thesis argues that both novels present memory not only as a personal faculty, but as something managed through structures of visibility, omission, and delayed revelation, reflecting the logic of contemporary algorithmic and AI systems. The first section examines how memory and identity are shaped through the control of information, silence, and disappearance. The second section focuses on narrative form, showing how memory is reconstructed through storytelling and mediated perception. The third section considers memory as a form of resistance, exploring how storytelling and material traces challenge processes of erasure. Together, the novels suggest that systems of control do not simply determine what is remembered but shape the conditions under which memory itself can emerge.