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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Ishiguro’s mimicry of artificial sentience scaffolds much of the novel, which organizes itself around surrealist descriptions to accommodate the quirks of robotic perception. In addition to the flat, impartial prose style, Ishiguro defamiliarizes moments of everyday experience to fully reflect Klara’s sensory experience. The novel reinterprets visual stimuli in ways that force the reader to experience the world anew. A runner and dogwalker form a “large creature with numerous limbs” as they pass each other. Absent touch, Klara confuses the physical properties of grass and brick walls, noting that Rick must crash through the grass blades and absorb the “impact” with his head.
This play on perception is often fantastic, if disorienting. “Boxes”—like camera focusing points—intrude upon Klara’s field of vision during moments of stress, partitioning her field of vision into smaller, disconnected slices of her surroundings or catching onto the Mother’s facial expressions. Klara’s vision deteriorates as the novel progresses. After donating her P-E-G oil to destroy the Cootings Machine, Klara finds that the theatergoers on the street devolve into a mass of “cones and cylinders made from smooth card,” and faces become two-dimensional and contoured. At times, these misperceptions sometimes make for humorous observations. On the drive to Morgan’s Falls, she observes that cars “would appear in the far distance and come speeding towards us, but the drivers never made errors and always managed to miss us.” Klara and the Sun reimagines sight and reinterprets human engagement with the world.
Klara’s unique perspective on the world gets reflected through capitalization, the novel’s most notable stylistic conceit. Terms like “Open Plan,” “Glass Display Trolley,” and the “Button Couch” add an endearing touch to the narration. At the most literal level, they rewrite the world into surprising and unfamiliar terms.
