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Klara 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 Artificial Friend who reads hearts well and the world wrongly

Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend, an AF, and the narrator of the whole novel. She begins in a city store, watching the street from the window, and is chosen by Josie, a sick fourteen-year-old. Ishiguro makes her unusually observant and completely devoted, but her understanding of the world is literal and partial: she believes the Sun is a kind being who can heal. The novel uses the gap between her precise attention and her mistaken beliefs to ask what love is, and whether a being made to serve can give something that is truly her own.

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

How Klara develops

Part One — the store

In the store Klara is already different from the other AFs. Where her friend Rosa assumes every passer-by is happy, Klara notices sadness, anger and mixed feelings, as when Coffee Cup Lady and Raincoat Man embrace and Manager explains that people can feel joy and pain at once. Her attention is the first thing the reader learns to trust.

Key moment. Klara sees Beggar Man and his dog lying motionless and, the next morning, sitting up again (Part One). She concludes that the Sun's nourishment revived them. For a solar-powered being the Sun really is a source of life, so her belief grows out of her nature; the reader suspects a simpler explanation, and that gap defines the whole novel.

Key moment. Klara keeps her promise to Josie and holds back from another girl who shows interest in her (Part One). Manager scolds her, since customers choose AFs and not the other way round. Klara's loyalty is a choice that risks her own future, which complicates any reading of her as merely programmed.

Parts Two and Three — learning the household

In the house on the prairie Klara studies the Mother, Melania Housekeeper, Rick and Josie, learning how to be a good companion. Her reports of the interaction meeting, where parents remark that Rick missed out, and of Morgan's Falls, where the Mother asks her to be Josie, carry meanings she does not yet grasp.

Key moment. At Morgan's Falls Klara imitates Josie so well that the Mother has to stop the game by calling her Klara (Part Two). Klara reports the request without suspicion. The reader feels the chill first, which is how Ishiguro uses a limited narrator to make the reader do the judging.

Key moment. Rick carries Klara to Mr McBain's barn, where she asks the Sun to heal Josie and promises something in return (Part Three). Faith becomes a bargain. The scene has the form of prayer: a sacred place, a petition for someone else, a promise of an act in return.

Part Four — the city

Key moment. Klara finds a figure in Josie's likeness in Mr Capaldi's studio and learns she is meant to continue Josie (Part Four). The portrait was never a painting. Klara is asked not only to train a new Josie but to become her, and she agrees to try if it is needed, while hoping Josie can be saved instead.

Key moment. With Josie's father's help Klara gives up some of her P-E-G Nine solution to disable a Cootings Machine (Part Four). Her gift to the Sun costs her part of herself, and afterwards her perception falters. On the drive home she sees another, larger machine, and her sacrifice seems wasted.

Parts Five and Six — the plea, the recovery and the Yard

Key moment. Klara's second visit to the barn, pleading for Josie on behalf of Josie and Rick's love (Part Five). She argues from love rather than from her own deserving. Days later the sunlight floods Josie's room and Josie begins to recover; the novel never confirms why.

Key moment. In the Yard, Klara tells Manager that what was special about Josie was in the people who loved her (Part Six). Her answer to the question of continuation. A machine reaches the novel's most humane conclusion, while lying among discarded AFs.

How Ishiguro builds Klara

Klara is built almost entirely from the way she tells the story. She narrates every page, and her narration is careful, literal and courteous. She names people by what they do or what she first noticed about them, such as Manager, Melania Housekeeper, Beggar Man and Coffee Cup Lady, which tells the reader that she organises the world by function and appearance.

Limited narrator: A narrator who reports honestly but understands less than the reader, so the reader has to interpret what is described. Klara is not lying; she is reasoning from incomplete knowledge.

Ishiguro keeps the reader slightly ahead of her. When the Mother asks her to copy Josie at Morgan's Falls, Klara reports the request without suspicion; the reader feels the chill before Klara names it. When Mr Capaldi's portrait turns out to be an AF body in Josie's likeness, the reader has been prepared by Rick's unease, Melania's warning and Miss Helen's strange story.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: argue that Klara's limitation is the novel's moral instrument. Because she never protests, the reader has to supply the judgement she withholds, about the Mother's plan, about lifting and about the Yard.

Klara in context

Published March 2021. The novel appeared on 2 March 2021, Ishiguro's first novel after his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. It entered a public conversation about artificial intelligence and companion technology, and it imagines a future where buying a machine friend for a child schooled at home is ordinary for families who can afford it.

A writer of service. Reviewers widely compared the novel with The Remains of the Day (1989), narrated by a butler devoted to service, and Never Let Me Go (2005), about young people created to serve others. Klara belongs to that line: a narrator whose whole identity is a duty, telling a story whose cost she cannot fully see.

Relationships

  • Josie — The purpose of Klara's existence. Klara loves Josie completely and is chosen, then gradually outgrown, by her.
  • The Mother — The Mother tests, uses and eventually protects Klara. Their relationship carries the continuation plan and its moral weight.
  • Rick — The human who helps her faith without sharing it, carries her to the barn and later confirms her belief about love.
  • Manager — Frames the novel: she sells Klara at the start and visits her in the Yard at the end.
  • The Sun — For Klara a living, kind being; for the reader an open question.

What Klara stands for

  • Klara stands for the question of whether devotion that was designed can still be love.
  • Her solar power makes her faith a literal truth stretched into a belief, which mirrors how faith often grows from experience.
  • Her fate in the Yard turns her into an image of everything a society discards once it is no longer useful.

Why Ishiguro made Klara

  • To narrate a human story through a mind that observes without self-interest, so the reader sees the humans more clearly than they see themselves.
  • To make the reader supply the judgements Klara never makes, about lifting, the continuation plan and the Yard.
  • To test whether what makes a person irreplaceable can be found inside them at all.

Readings you could defend

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

  • Klara is the most fully loving character in the novel, and her machine nature is the point: love here is measured by attention and sacrifice, not by biology.
  • Klara is a perfectly designed product whose devotion is what she was built for, and the novel is disturbing precisely because that devotion cannot refuse anything.
  • Klara's faith is an error that happens to coincide with recovery; the novel's real interest is in how a limited mind makes meaning from coincidence.

Essay arguments

  • Ishiguro builds Klara on a split between precise attention to people and mistaken beliefs about the world, and the novel judges the first to matter more.
  • Klara's sacrifice of her P-E-G Nine solution shows love as a chosen cost, which challenges readings of her as merely programmed.
  • Klara's acceptance of the continuation plan is the most disturbing thing about her, because it shows a devotion with no limit.
  • The Yard turns Klara into the novel's quiet accusation against a society that discards what it has finished with.

Klara in theme essays

  • Love: Klara's sacrifice and her final conclusion about Josie.
  • Artificial minds: Klara as evidence for and against the idea that a machine could have a heart.
  • Faith: the beggar, the two barn visits and the recovery.
  • Loneliness: the store window and the Yard as bookends.

Questions that get asked

  • Explore the ways in which Ishiguro presents Klara in Klara and the Sun.
  • How far do you agree that Klara understands people better than the humans in the novel do?
  • In what ways does Ishiguro present Klara's faith in the Sun?

Think you understand it?

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  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of Klara 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 Klara in Klara and the Sun against the writer in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — 4 authored exam-style questions on Klara, marked on Incandio with the mistake you actually made named.

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