Breaking Down Walls in Post-Pandemic Transnational Fables: Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Klara and the Sun</i> and Mohsin Hamid’s <i>The Last White Man</i>

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man are fables that indirectly engage with the COVID-19 pandemic. While neither novel explicitly mentions the pandemic, they offer subtle reflections on this period in our history and forecast COVID’s fallout. Ishiguro uses a childlike persona to explore a dystopian world involving artificial intelligence and gene editing. Hamid elliptically addresses the pandemic in the context of a resurgence of racism and the resilient response from Black Lives Matter activists over the past half-decade. I examine the two authors’ indirect representations of the pandemic and the way in which it triggers reflections on those partitions and fences put up to divide us. The pandemic’s inherently challenging nature for direct representation is echoed in these writers’ decision to create fables not tied to any particular country. While Ishiguro’s and Hamid’s novels evoke ideas about disease, death, and bereavement, they primarily focus on loneliness, digital dependency, and the social divisions that have arisen, especially since 2016 due to events such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Readers look through Ishiguro’s titular cyborg character Klara’s eyes as she tries to make sense of the boxes, rectangles, partitions, and walls that she sees. And Hamid uses absurdism to explore racial classification, whereby characters lose their whiteness and cross over to an unstated ethnicity for the rest of their lives. These authors’ transnational narratives encourage breaking down the metaphorical and physical barriers that have divided people. Through their fable-like storytelling, the novelists strive to connect people and blur the lines that separate us.