Emotional Repression in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

This essay argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun can be read as a novel integrating a robotic narrator and narrative unreliability. By unfolding Klara’s strategy to present a false self-portrait as a successful Artificial Friend, I analyze how Klara fails to fully suppress her desire to be assimilated into human society. The essay further discusses the blurred border between humans and automatons in Ishiguro’s works, as well as the necessity to empathize with a complicated nonhuman subjectivity.