The aim of this article is to examine the phenomenon of thematic and lexical ‘copying’ in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. The act of ‘copying’ specifically refers to the author’s creative use of lexical meanings through polysemy, neologism and euphemism. The analysis of this strategy shows that it ultimately leads to the onset of oppositional interpretations (antonymy, irony and disphemism), which appear to pervade every element of the literary landscape of Never Let Me Go. In other words, Kazuo Ishiguro innovatively creates cloned ‘copies’ of original words thus producing an alienation effect responsible for the stylistic and literary complexity of the novel.