Klara and the Sun: Foil 3 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.

As an observer of their long-running friendship, Klara straddles these two starkly separate worlds. Rick and Josie hold up mirrors to the cutthroat realities of the world. Josie benefits from oblong sessions, housekeepers, and the promise of fulfilling social prospects. By contrast, Rick endures the humiliation of interaction meetings and must pull strings with Mr. Vance. The character foil invites a comparative contrast in who deserves what. The kid who builds autonomous drones is denied opportunities for advancement, while Josie—the ungrateful beneficiary of privilege—succumbs to sickness or overbearing vapidity. Klara senses the difference even through her own experience. Rick offers Klara a piggyback ride en route to Mr. McBain’s barn; Josie meanwhile relies on Klara to wake her each morning. One serves and the other gets served.

Moreover, Josie and Rick's “plan” doesn’t hold up as expected. For all Josie’s early, childish insistence upon marriage and union, she and Rick part ways as they come of age—she attends college and leaves Rick behind. Their “love” fizzles out in the face of social expectations and oppressive hierarchies. The novel draws upon Rick and Josie’s friendship to showcase two alternate lived experiences and, through it, critique a painfully unequal society.

The comparisons begin as early as their first shifts at the store window. When Klara detects a “sadness” or “anger” in the faces of children who approach the storefront, Rosa dismisses these fears, concluding instead that “you worry too much.” Much of Klara’s account of the store unfolds as a running record of opposites.  Klara catches the “cruel thoughts” passing through an AF owner’s head, while Rosa cheerily glosses over them. When the two taxi drivers brawl outside their store window one afternoon, Rosa interprets the scuffle as “just playing.” Rosa is so bluntly imperceptive that Klara admits the AF “could fail to notice so much, and even when I pointed something out to her, she’d still not see what was special or interesting about it.” Of the AF pair, one recognizes loneliness, anger, and love. The other sees little, rarely if ever noticing at all.

This difference in outlook makes Klara more deeply attuned to the anxieties of the society around her. She notices the B3s distancing themselves from their B2 predecessors, and a weary AF trailing behind his abusive owner. She is aware of the fragile bonds between owner and AF where Rosa is not, and she picks up on the injustices that her window companion fails to. Klara may not recognize the perils of consumerism but she senses them, along with all the ethical violations of a system that purchases sentient beings and abandons them after their use. Klara detects the problems in her world, even if she doesn’t always understand them.

While Rosa gets purchased before Klara, this foil extends far beyond their time together in the store. When Klara reunites with the Manager at the end of the novel, she explains how she had a “successful home,” only to find out that “things didn’t go as well for Rosa.” The pair’s difference in personality has now translated to a contrast in fate, and the opposition carries itself to the novel’s very end.