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Josie in Klara and the Sun — character analysis

Klara and the Sun · Kazuo Ishiguro · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) — Modern Prose option · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. The sick, lifted girl at the centre of everyone's plans

Josie is fourteen when she sees Klara in the store window and promises to come back for her. She is pale, thin and seriously ill, and she has been lifted, the novel's term for genetic editing that boosts academic ability. She is warm, honest and sometimes sharp, and her friendship with Rick, her unlifted neighbour, is the novel's picture of young love. Ishiguro makes her the object of every plan in the book, the Mother's, Rick's and Klara's, and uses her to ask what in a person cannot be planned for or copied.

Build your reading of Josie in Klara and the Sun, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this study carries all three.

How Josie develops

Parts One and Two — choosing and being chosen

Key moment. Josie talks to Klara through the glass and promises to return; illness keeps her away for weeks (Part One). Josie chooses by feeling, and her promise is kept despite the illness. Her absence makes Klara wait, the first of many times Josie's body decides the story.

Key moment. Josie insists that Rick comes to the interaction meeting with lifted children (Part Two). Her loyalty crosses the divide her society draws, though she is distant from him during the meeting itself.

Parts Three to Five — illness, art and fear

Josie's drawings, and the bubble game in which Rick captions them, show a private language between the two friends. As her health and their futures diverge, the game grows tense, and Rick's captions sometimes hurt her.

Key moment. Josie wakes in the night and tells her mother she does not want to die (Part Three). Her courage in the day is shown to be effortful. The stakes of every adult plan become personal.

Key moment. Josie wakes in the flood of sunlight and says she feels better (Part Five). The recovery is reported by Klara and left unexplained, so Josie's survival is the novel's great open question.

Part Six — growing up and leaving

Key moment. Josie drifts from Rick and spends time with college-bound friends (Part Six). The healthy young woman moves into a world shaped by lifting that Rick cannot follow.

Key moment. Josie hugs Klara for a long time before leaving for college (Part Six). A loving goodbye that is still a goodbye; Klara thanks her for choosing her, closing the circle from the store window.

How Ishiguro builds Josie

Josie is seen only through Klara, so she arrives already loved. Klara records her moods with care: her warmth in the store window, her honesty about her bad days, her coolness after Morgan's Falls, her fear in the night before the city trip. Ishiguro lets her be difficult as well as sweet, which keeps her a person rather than an object of pity.

Her drawings are her own voice. The bubble game she plays with Rick, in which she draws and he writes the speech bubbles, shows two children communicating through a private language, and the strain that enters the game shows the strain entering the friendship.

Grade 9 insight. Ishiguro makes Josie the object of everyone's plans: the Mother's plan to continue her, Rick's plan to share a future with her, Klara's plan to save her. The question the novel asks through her is what in a person cannot be planned for or copied.

Josie in context

A lifted child. Josie has been lifted, the novel's term for genetic editing that boosts academic ability. Her illness is never fully explained, but the Mother links it to the lifting she chose. A reader in 2021 would hear debates about gene editing and designed advantage behind that choice.

Schooling and competition. Josie studies at home with screen tutors and is pushed towards interaction meetings to practise socialising for college. The novel exaggerates a familiar pressure: childhood treated as preparation for a competitive future.

Relationships

  • Klara — Josie chooses Klara, confides in her, sometimes shuts her out, and finally outgrows her.
  • Rick — Childhood friend and planned future partner; their bond strains under the lifted and unlifted divide.
  • The Mother — Loved intensely, and planned for before she is told that the portrait is not a painting.
  • The Father — Loves her and opposed the lifting; their meeting in the city is strained by what he cannot tell her.

What Josie stands for

  • Josie represents the child as a project, improved by lifting and planned for by the continuation scheme.
  • Her recovery stands for everything in the novel that cannot be proved: love, prayer, chance.
  • Her drawings stand for an inner life that no portrait or copy can reach.

Why Ishiguro made Josie

  • To put a real, difficult child at the centre of a society that treats children as investments.
  • To give the continuation question a face the reader cares about.
  • To show love surviving change, since Josie and Rick separate and their love is still called real.

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of Josie can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • Josie is a victim of her mother's choices, and her illness is the price of advantage.
  • Josie is an ordinary teenager, and the novel's sadness is that ordinary growing up looks like abandonment from Klara's point of view.
  • Josie is deliberately elusive, seen only through Klara, so the reader learns that a person exceeds what anyone observes of her.

Essay arguments

  • Ishiguro presents Josie as the object of everyone's plans so that the novel can ask what in her cannot be planned.
  • Josie's friendship with Rick shows inequality working slowly on love rather than destroying it outright.
  • Josie's goodbye to Klara is tender and final, and the novel refuses to call it betrayal.

Josie in theme essays

  • Lifting and inequality: Josie as a lifted child and her divergence from Rick.
  • Love: the drawing, the message passed through Rick, the goodbye.
  • Faith: Josie's recovery as the novel's unanswered question.

Questions that get asked

  • Explore the ways in which Ishiguro presents Josie in Klara and the Sun.
  • Discuss the importance of the relationship between Josie and Rick in the novel.

Think you understand it?

Reading is the start. On Incandio a topic counts as mastered only once you have taught it and defended it — the two things a revision guide cannot ask of you.

Incandio this topic → Prove it. Teach it. Defend it. What does “Incandio it” mean?

  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of Josie in Klara and the Sun to Ember, an AI pupil who has not made one, and answer the awkward question. Understanding is credited; wording is not required.
  2. Defend it — Hold your reading of Josie in Klara and the Sun against the writer in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — exam-style practice, marked on Incandio.

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