Ishiguro closely connects issues of personhood and humanity to the contemporary fear that machines will replace human beings. This is where Ishiguro points his readers to a difficult question: Is it possible for science and technology to replicate an individual in entirety, to fully capture their true essence? As Josie’s father asks, “Do you believe in the human heart? I am speaking in the poetic sense…Something that makes each of us special and individual?” She wants Klara to learn every aspect of Josie so that when she dies, Klara can replace her in a new robotic body identical to Josie’s. Josie’s mother, however, has an additional motive for buying Klara. But Klara, powered through solar energy, believes that she can save Josie by asking the Sun for magical help.
Through Klara’s eyes, we catch a glimpse of the conundrum that Josie’s mother experiences as she realizes the adverse consequences of ‘lifting’ her child, facing the possibility of Josie dying. It is through Klara that the reader learns about Josie’s strange and mysterious illness, attributed potentially to her being ‘lifted’. AF Klara is purchased from a store as a ‘friend’ for a human child, Josie. Rather like Ishiguro’s narrators in other books – a butler in The Remains of the Day and a cloned human in Never Let Me Go – her narration brings to the fore the perspective of the ‘other’, making the reader see the world in unfamiliar ways.Ī core aspect of the story is the question of what it means to be a person. Klara, a robot engineered to be an Artificial Friend (AF), narrates the story and it is through her worldview that events unfold.
This may seem far-fetched but the phenomenon of being ‘lifted’ has parallels in contemporary society: Just as better education for children today is connected to socio-economic status and increased opportunities in life, being ‘lifted’ in Ishiguro’s novel signals higher status and a better chance at life. Machines now possess the emotional capacity to become friends with human children, specifically those who have been genetically engineered to become more intelligent, or as the book terms it, have been ‘lifted’. The current work, which can be regarded as science fiction, provides a glimpse of a dystopian future in which machines potentially replace human beings not merely for technical purposes but also social ones.
Released on Maand longlisted for the Booker Prize, this book is an extension of some of the areas that the Nobel Prize winning writer has previously explored.
“It’s not faith that you need but rationality.” This sentence touches upon one of the central themes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest book, Klara and the Sun.
0 kommentar(er)
