Humanizing Machines, Robotizing Humans: Postmodern Reflections in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
Humanizing Machines, Robotizing Humans: Postmodern Reflections in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Summary/Abstract: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) explores the shifting boundary between human and machine through the dual processes of humanizing robots and robotizing humans. Narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend whose empathy and imagination defy mechanical categorization, the novel portrays humans increasingly mechanized by genetic engineering, efficiency, and substitution. Drawing on Haraway’s cyborg, Jameson’s late-capitalist commodification, Lyotard’s performativity, and Hutcheon’s metafiction, this paper argues that Ishiguro employs postmodern strategies—fragmentation, indeterminacy, and perspectival limitation—to dramatize the ontological instability of subjectivity in the age of artificial intelligence.

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