Klara and the Sun: Motifs 5 key examples

Klara’s subsequent references to birds reveal her dependence upon the natural world. She makes sense of foreign objects by likening them to birds, suggesting an impulse to rewrite the unfamiliar into the terms of nature. Upon returning to the city, she compares a cyclist’s board to a “flattened bird.” More notably, she confuses Rick’s fleet of drones with a flock of “machine birds.” Human innovations always imitate natural ones, relying on nature’s creatures and resources for inspiration.

Birds reflect a conception in which the manmade is inseparable from the natural. Unlike works that commonly pit the artificial realm against nature, Klara and the Sun does away with this opposition by recasting a future in which the two mutually coexist. Klara is a creation of silicon circuits and P-E-G fluid, but she depends vitally upon the Sun’s light. Her interests coincide with those of the environment: her plan to save Josie depends on easing Pollution by destroying the Cootings Machine. Approached from an environmental perspective, Klara’s mission is as much an attempt at ecological preservation as it is a bid to cure her owner. At points better attuned to the natural world than the human one around her, Klara shows how nature and technology can be intertwined with each another.

If there is anything that Klara struggles to do, it is to interpret and create art. The novel’s AF protagonist is prone to visual errors, partitioning the sky into boxes or mistaking the crowd of theatergoers to be an aggregate of circles and cones. Even when her perception is properly functioning, she struggles to engage with the novel’s moments of art. Josie and Rick’s doodling game, for instance, elicits puzzlement on her part. “Although for me it was difficult to understand who many faces stood for, Rick appeared to have no such problem,” she explains. Rick can fill in the bubble, but she cannot. Her admission suggests that art lies beyond her ability to interpret and engage with. Art is unique and exclusive to humans, seemingly insulated by technological development.

Mr. Capaldi’s “portrait” project threatens to undermine this. He and the Mother advance technological progress partly under the guise of art, passing their attempt to create a “continuation of Josie” as a purely artistic endeavor. His work of art is aimed less at expression than at replacement—he replicates Josie in the interest of creating carbon-copies rather than pursuing any inspiration of his own. In bringing technology together with art, he also allows the former to intrude upon the realm of the latter.

Windows allow Klara to broaden her powers of understanding and empathy. The earlier half of Klara’s narrative casts the store window as the source of some of her most formative memories. The windows offer crucial glimpses into the world beyond, satisfying her desire to “see more of the outside” in “all its detail.” Gazing out at the street exposes her to fighting taxi drivers, the Coffee Cup Lady, and Beggar Man. Klara also notices the unhappy children and abandoned AFs, witnessing the undersides of technological consumerism. For the first time, windows open her eyes to the messiness of human emotion and the improbable promise of coincidence. They offer Klara her first forays into the real world.

If windows face the outer world, they also provide a view into its insides. Windows enclose the pie-shaped diner in which Rick and Mr. Vance meet, exposing the diner manager “waiting for customers in his white apron and white cap.” Watching the manager and the customer who has her forehead “touching the glass,” Klara experiences the inner, private loneliness of an increasingly disconnected society.

But windows are vulnerable to misperceptions even as they expand Klara’s knowledge. They show her the world and inadvertently distort it at the same time, sometimes producing false impressions. The sun does not literally set within Mr. McBain’s barn, but Klara assumes so while gazing out from Josie’s bedroom window. Even when realizing that it isn’t a “resting place,” she extends this mistaken conceit by assuming it to be the Sun’s “point of calling.” Windows entertain misconceptions—crucial ones—as much as they expose Klara to the real world.

The motif comes full circle near the novel’s end. By the time Josie nears college, Klara finds herself consigned to the “Utility Room” and gazing at the sunset through its “high small window.” The view of Mr. McBain’s barn is “similar,” but the roof intrudes and the trajectory has changed. With it, the novel leaves the reader with an uneasy sense of surprise and despair: what had previously widened Klara’s horizons now seems to tragically cramp her instead.

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.

At Mr. Capaldi’s, when the Father reunites with Josie, the Father presents Josie with a mirror that “shows you the way you really look.” But its promise of accurate reflection extends beyond the concerns of facial appearance. On the evening when Klara prays to the Sun in Mr. McBain’s barn, she catches its reflections from a stack of glass windows:

I stared at the glass sheets. The Sun’s reflection, though still an intense orange, was no longer blinding and as I studied more carefully the Sun’s face framed within the outermost rectangle, I began to appreciate that I wasn’t looking at a single picture; that in fact there existed a different version of the Sun’s face on each of the glass surfaces, and what I might at first have taken for a unified image was in fact seven separate ones superimposed over the other as my gaze penetrated from the first sheet to the last. Although his face on the outermost glass was forbidding and aloof, and the one immediately behind it was, if anything, even more unfriendly, the two beyond that were softer and kinder.

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The stacks of propped glass perform a double function: they reduce and reflect the Sun’s blinding light, allowing Klara to see all its different faces in the process. They are, in effect, mirrors. The successive windowpanes attenuate the glare until the Sun takes on “kinder” and more generous dimensions, approachable at last to its worshipper. What seemed to be a unified image—one featuring a star that is impossible to gaze at directly, no less—splits into softer, friendlier pieces. Mirrors peer past first impressions, towards nuance and subtlety instead.

Fittingly, this awareness of complexity maps onto the world around her. The AF protagonist realizes that the truth is often more than meets the eye—Josie behaves “strangely” during the interaction meeting, and Rick’s cold first introduction eventually melts into something warmer. She discovers that the tension between Josie and the Mother doesn’t lie in the conversation topics themselves, but rather what is “beneath these topics.” People and feelings are more complex than their appearances may suggest. Mirrors allow Klara to peel away the layers of social identity, the signs and symbols, in order to understand the world’s workings more intimately.