Klara and the Sun: Irony 6 key examples

Through Klara’s remarkable investment in her plan, the novel creates a rich irony that flips the tables on her human counterparts. In popular cultural imagination, computers are hardly creatures of faith—they are impersonal and coldly calculating. And yet Klara defies these expectations entirely. She creates an assemblage of fictions, loosely knitting each to the other. She witnesses the Beggar Man’s revival at the hands of the Sun. She prays inside McBain’s barn, a structure she convinces herself to be the Sun’s “point of calling” even after accepting that it isn’t the Sun’s “resting place.” She inspires the Father to destroy the Cootings Machine, rousing him to hope—the “damn thing” that “never leaves you alone.”

In an unexpected reversal of the usual relations, the robot ends up having more faith than any of the human characters around her. The Mother, ruthlessly pragmatic, makes plans with Mr. Capaldi in the event of Josie’s death. Atlas Brookings admissions—like the world at large—rejects Rick despite his clear talents. Klara and the Sun imagines a world overrun by the hard rationality of numbers, contingency plans, and market projections. As such, it invites difficult questions—what happens when computers can place greater trust in others than people do?

The miracle is that Josie survives; Klara’s hope, however implausible, does come to pass. An AF’s faith is a human’s certainty, and the novel further complicates this distinction when Mr. Capaldi explains the unusual AF methods of arriving at surefire conclusions. Klara’s prophetic powers even surprise Rick, who keeps “wondering if there was more to it” than mere AF superstition. In this way, Ishiguro also suggestively questions the extent of Klara’s faith. Is this mere belief, or does it mask some subconscious calculations beyond her grasp? Klara and the Sun is an uplifting story about a robot who travels great lengths on the basis of sheer belief, but one that speaks just as hauntingly to a future in which humans must depend on machines for hope.

The irony of this observation—yet another simplistic stereotype launched in Klara’s direction—is that it is false. In fact, the Mother’s conception of robotic memory couldn’t seem to be further from the truth. Ishiguro’s narrative yields a portrait of a protagonist who is more than capable of both memory and nostalgia. Klara misses her old store, thinks constantly of the Manager, and feels happiness at the sight of the “Tow-Away Zone” signs upon returning to the city. Memory informs her anticipation of seeing the AF store, just as it does her poignant, “startled” disappointment at its disappearance.

Only further undercutting the Mother’s assumption is the fact that the novel itself is a retrospective attempt to make sense of the past. Klara narrates in the Yard, trying to place her memories “back in its true context” even as she undergoes her “slow fade.” She spends so much time rearranging these memories that she admits “I’ve forgotten for long moments that I am, in reality, sitting here in the Yard, on this hard ground.” In its reminiscence, the story speaks to the very kind of longing that the Mother overlooks.

This exchange spotlights the central surprise offered by Ishiguro’s novel. The story’s portrait of Klara steers clear from the popular cliches that feature unfeeling or malicious robots. Klara is capable of feeling, thanks to her powers of observation. She not only feels but understands the messiness of the human condition. Klara can sense the innate “goodness” in the children, despite their behavior at Josie’s interaction meeting. She feels sadness at the sight of the dead Beggar Man and joy in the reunion between the Coffee Cup Lady and the Raincoat Man, people entirely unrelated to her. Klara’s sensitivity is so expansive that she seems more emotionally attuned to those around her than the humans themselves. Her sensitivity contrasts against the Mother’s neediness and, in this exchange, the crudeness of her suggestion—a point-blank denial of human feeling.

Bearing “horns,” “cold eyes,” “so many signals of anger,” and “the wish to destroy,” the bull in this moment brings Klara to a state of fear not experienced elsewhere. The feeling is hardly rational and even harder to describe: Klara herself admits the apparent absurdity of her terror, given her distance from the creature and her previous exposure to bulls through magazines. But the scale of the feeling is enough to move the even-keeled AF to “exclamation” and to feel “something more, something stranger and deeper.” Klara trembles at the bull, and imagines it even as she stumbles toward Mr. McBain’s barn. The bull may be the closest embodiment of pure evil that the novel provides.

Klara’s horror expresses deeper, primal concerns. More than recoiling at the sight of the bull, Klara’s recognition of its ferocity leads her to question its existence entirely. She explains how the bull belongs to the “mud and darkness” and how it bespeaks “some great error,” beliefs that strike an uncanny resonance with the Frankenstein-like trope of the “Creature.” It advances the impression of some nightmarishly malicious, uncontrollable monster that has overpowered any limits its creator could have foreseen.

Ironically, this suggestion isn’t applied to robots, the usual suspects of unbridled monstrosity and dystopian fantasies in popular culture. Klara instead places this Promethean anxiety upon a creation of nature rather than a machine like herself. The bull, not the robot, threatens the world with its “awful consequences.” Klara projects her own fears of replacement and powerlessness upon her surroundings.

This failure to “get the memo” exposes the gap between Klara’s sensibilities and common intuition. Klara plainly misinterprets the demands placed upon her, despite a set of clues that couldn’t have been any more obvious. She has seen Josie’s replica suspended in the closet. She has heard Mr. Capaldi explain that the “new Josie won’t be an imitation” but a “continuation,” and that “it’s Klara who’ll make the difference.” But she proposes teaching the AF to replicate Josie instead, oblivious to the very fact that she is expected to turn into Josie’s substitute. Klara needs her duty spelled out in its plainest form to grasp it.

Ishiguro exploits this instance of misunderstanding to reveal the AF’s limitations and to complicate the ethical stakes of this plan for replacement. The moment at Mr. Capaldi’s is laden with all kinds of implicit suggestions and moral dilemmas. The reader, Mother, Father, and Mr. Capaldi each recognize what Klara does not, and they are forced to reframe the request in its uncomfortable baldness. This dramatic irony also questions the extent of Klara’s complicity. Can she be guilty of overtaking her human owner even if she has no intentions of doing so? The novel depicts an AF entangled in a plan that she hardly understands, and it reminds the reader that even the well-intentioned can be oblivious participants in acts of dubious morality.

Beyond the bitter surprise of this discovery, this admission is ironic. Klara’s only foe—if there is any—shapes up to be the Cootings Machine, the struggle against which drives the greater part of the novel’s plot. Believing Josie’s sickness to be caused by the Sun’s dismay at the machine’s Pollution, Klara intends to save Josie by destroying the machine. She prays to the Sun and tracks one down with the help of the Father, even offering her own P-E-G oil to destroy it.

So obsessed with stopping the Cootings Machine, her war against these instruments of construction only makes her eventual abandonment all the more unexpected and ironic. Klara destroys a Cootings Machine that sits in the ramshackle lot. She ends up in just this kind of Yard herself, a dumpster of sorts where pieces of machine or “dented grille panels” lay in rows. She suffers the same fate as the thing she destroys. The novel’s outcome suggests that, however much Klara tries to prove her use, she is unable to separate herself from the less favorable connotations attached to technology and machinery.