Borrowed Grief Projection, Mourning, and the Artificial Screen in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) has generally been read through the lens of posthumanism, with critics asking what the novel says about artificial minds, consciousness, and the ethical status of machines built to feel (Ajeesh and Rukmini; Sahu and Karmakar). Klara, the Artificial Friend (AF) who narrates the novel, is repeatedly framed by scholarship as a test case for whether a machine can possess genuine interiority, and whether human beings can ever truly know that interiority from the outside (Shang). This paper takes a different approach. Rather than asking what Klara is, it asks what Klara is used for. Read this way, Klara and the Sun is less a novel about artificial intelligence than a novel about human beings who cannot bear to look directly at loss, illness, and death, and who therefore route their most unbearable feelings through a listening, watching, uncomplaining object that will not look away, argue back, or die on its own schedule. Josie's mother, Chrissie, projects her anticipatory grief and her guilt over Josie's genetic "lifting" onto Klara by quietly preparing Klara to become a replacement daughter. Josie herself, isolated by illness from ordinary adolescent life, projects her need for an unthreatening companion onto Klara rather than risk further loss with human friends. Even Rick and the wider adult world around the Arthur family treat AFs as safe vessels for anxieties they will not name directly. Klara, in other words, functions across the novel as a screen: an entity human characters can fill with their own dread of mortality precisely because she seems not to have a mortality, or a claim, of her own.