This MA thesis investigates the portrayal of social division, societal structure, class
relations and the suppressors utilization of the oppressed in the Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) when analyzed from
a Marxist perspective. This is examined by the use of Fredric Jameson’s The Political
Unconscious; Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’ class theory; and Michel Foucault’s notions of
Docility, Panopticism, and Punish. The separate analyses investigate the protagonists' lives in
relation to the portrayal of insolvable conflicts, ideological oppositions, and class relations as
well as the creation of docile bodies, surveillance societies, and measures of punishment and
how these measures are utilized in the class relations. Through the analyses, it is clear that
both novels portray oppositional ideological standpoints, which enables an investigation of
the portrayal of the class divisions, their interrelations, and power relations. Conclusively, it
is evident that they share several thematics, such as surveillance, social inequality, punish and
humanity, which are also evident in contemporary, western, society, wherefore it is
concluded that the novels continue to be relevant, when read from this Marxist point of view.