Humanizing Artificial Bodies: Empathy and Camaraderie in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021)

Influenced by the massive rise of technology and digitization in the twentieth century, the Japanese-American writer Kazuo Ishiguro deals with the developments and repercussions of technology that particularly has to do with human replicas, whom he probingly assesses their influence on human society and human relationships. His two novels, Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021) present a wide array of human emotions that clones and “Artificial Friends”, as referred to in the latter, can practice in a world that is replete with illness, dysfunctional relationships, social ills and death. The Post-human Turn in humanities and literature questions the endurance of human agency and its role in controlling the governing state of affairs. With the advent of technology, the age-long central role of human beings has become more subsidiary, and more non-human creatures and inventions have started to take center-stage in the contemporary world. Notwithstanding the fact that they continuously struggle to survive in a world that does not wholeheartedly acknowledge them, these clones and Artificial Friend(s) are, ironically, presented as more humane than humans. The relegation of humans to the background and the centralization of post-humans brings the hidden psychological complexities of the latter to the limelight. As such, in the aforementioned novels, Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro illuminates the sufferings, mishaps and, most importantly, the sense of empathy and solidarity that these post-humans can possibly form and express to counter the wrongdoings and evil tendencies that humans exhibit.