Klara and the Sun: Allegory 2 key examples

These differences leave ample room for conflict, and its result is a lurking tension that keeps pace with their friendship. As Klara observes, a troubling “coldness” develops between the two even as they gaze at sunsets or flip through photo albums together. The novel alerts the reader to a growing sense of uneasiness: during her interaction meeting, Josie hurtfully jokes to her guests that she should have purchased a B3 instead. Klara adds an unintentional insult, too, by accepting the Mother’s invitation to visit Morgan’s Falls and leaving Josie behind. Klara is a caretaker, friend, and—at a level implicit in the plot—Josie’s rival.

Human and AF are as different as their physical bodies—that is, until they are not. These underlying tensions tend ultimately towards replacement itself, as Klara accepts her duty of being Josie at Mr. Capaldi’s. Klara agrees to continue Josie in the event of her owner’s death, physically displacing Josie in the process. Mimicking her owner’s voice and mirroring her gait with unnerving accuracy, the “new Josie won’t be an imitation. She really will be Josie.” Klara’s fraught relationship with Josie sits at the heart of the novel’s most urgent question—whether an AF can actually probe the depths of the human soul and take it over. The Mother and Mr. Capaldi build an equivalence between Klara and Josie to the point where one can simply supplant the other. In what seems like a paradox, the novel presses human and AF so tightly together that they become one and the same.

The threat of replacement pulls back the differences between Klara and Josie to suggest their unexpected similarities. In a strangely ironic sense, the apparent contrasts end up revealing shared parallels. In grasping for some human essence, the novel draws attention to the fact that Josie is hardly more natural than Klara herself. Josie is a “lifted” human, after all, biologically altered and vaulted above the regular Ricks. Klara is equally prone to replacement at the hands of more advanced B3s. The pairing leaves behind a fuller portrait of both characters, each with their vulnerabilities and threatening advantages.

Mr. Capaldi’s plan never comes to pass. Misguidedly or not, Klara gives up her P-E-G fluid to destroy the Cootings Machine and appease the Sun. It is an act of questionable logic but, more than that, of love. Klara leaves her owner with life and strength, caring for Josie in a moving sacrifice. If the Father believes there is something special in Josie, Klara’s act reminds the reader that there may be something just as special within her. By placing its two main characters in dangerously close proximity to each other, the novel navigates the complexities of identity and selfhood.

Klara’s experiences portray a world devoid of faith and defined almost entirely by technological calculus. At this point, people—like the Father—have been laid off en masse, humans have acquired the power to edit themselves, and sentient beings get marketed as products. A growing socioeconomic rift plays out in the hyperbolic struggle for college admissions and the “lifting” process. In this hyper-optimized world, technological progress has displaced personal bonds. Human and AFs alike must each fear for their replacement: Klara nearly supplants Josie, B2s lose their place to B3s, and Klara ends up in the Yard once she loses her usefulness. Ishiguro’s novel crafts a fictional reality that critiques the constant, endless churn of substitutes and upgrades.

In this mercilessly competitive landscape, Klara’s mission to save Josie reads as a journey to reclaim hope and trust. The Sun—the novel’s most recognizable symbol—introduces a semi-religious element to the work. Addressed as “Sun” and prayed to, the star seems to be Klara’s equivalent of God. It bears plenty of Platonic associations, too; Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” a work that imagines a cave dweller seeing the sun for the first time in their life, casts the sun as the ultimate source of pure truth and reason. Within Klara’s cosmology, the Sun’s evil counterpart is the Cootings Machine, which spews murky clouds and testifies to the forces of reckless development. Where the Sun illuminates, the Cootings Machine conceals. This diametrical opposite of the Sun and its “kindness” becomes Klara’s main antagonist. Accordingly, the AF’s plan to destroy this machine is an attempt to salvage faith in an age that has lost touch with it.