The Recovery of Self in Emotional Authenticity: Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Klara and the Sun</i>

Abstract The novel is a fable about the amelioration of human behavior and a cautionary tale about the paradigm of rationality with its corresponding devaluation of emotion. It depicts the AI narrator Klara in a mechanized rural American society of the near future. Klara’s role is to provide affectionate care for a genetically modified or “lifted” middle-class teenager, to balance her improved intelligence with a schooling in consideration for others. The novel satirizes the contradiction of treating the apparently non-human but inwardly altruistic as alternately human and sub-human. Learning about human emotion and ethics as she goes, Klara becomes compassionate, patient, and loving. Since she hopes that her charge, made seriously ill by the genetic editing process, will survive, she expresses that hope through her faith, which is comically modelled on human assumptions about faith that she learns from observation. Klara helps those humans close to her to recover their authentic emotional selves to the limited degree that their enculturation permits, unveiling the depression caused by unawareness of universal emotional needs. Her narrative of embodying love and faith amidst mechanized humans reclaims the innocence of the child and the lamb, as emphasized by the novel’s Blakean tone and allusions. The unwaged Klara in this novel dedicated to the author’s mother represents the idealization and corresponding relegation of a subtle and mature management of emotion to the caregivers of the female gender; ironically, it also points out the universal human value of non-judgment and openness toward love.