Klara and the Sun: Situational Irony 2 key examples

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.

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.