Previous
Pathos
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Klara and the Sun takes place in a largely unspecified future. Though Ishiguro withholds most details from the reader, the work is likely set in the United States. Much of the physical landscape, at least, is immediately recognizable: Klara spends the early part of the novel recalling her time at the AF store windows and, after being purchased by Josie, spends time with Josie's family in their house in the countryside. Through it all, she describes familiar city skyscrapers, waterfall parks, and rolling country pastures.
The novel’s setting resembles the reader’s present-day world in its broad outlines but departs from it in many other respects. Though the landscape has remained much the same, the social structures have not. Klara’s account offers a glimpse into a society whose inequalities are wider, and competition fiercer, than before. The world that Klara shows her reader is divided sharply between the haves and have-nots, with the privileged classes benefitting from rare access to AF companions and elite college institutions while masses of the less fortunate get left behind or altogether replaced. Cultural attitudes towards the AF herself are as polarized as the socioeconomics: on one hand, Klara gets welcomed into a friendship with Josie, neatly insulated from hardship or want. But she is also verbally harassed by theatergoers who blame her for taking all the jobs, and she herself eventually gets abandoned into the dumping yard. For all its superficial similarities to modern America, Klara and the Sun takes present-day social realities to their troubling extremes.
Related Themes:
