Juliana Jones
Juliana Jones-Beaton (she/her) is currently an English literature PhD student at the University of Delaware. She holds her master’s degree in English literature from Mississippi State University. She is studying technology, bodies, and memory in contemporary American speculative fiction. Her research interests consider how bodies are depicted in and interact with post-apocalyptic futures and environments, in terms of gender, race, and disability. To learn more about her research and teaching, visit https://juliana.beaton.page/.
A Futurity of Loneliness in Klara and the Sun
“The heart you speak of,’ I said. ‘It might indeed be the hardest part of Josie to learn. It might be like a house with many rooms. Even so, a devoted [Artificial Friend], given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home.” – Klara and the Sun[1]
In 2011, Sherry Turkle, psychologist and author, wrote, “[w]e are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.[2] It is likely Kazou Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun is not a direct response or rejoinder to Turkle’s sentiments, but it may as well be for all the ways that Ishiguro flips the script on robotic friendship. Turkle’s line above appears in her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. The book was largely an updated version of her 1984 book The Second Self, focusing on the changes in technology between 1984 and 2011. Turkle writes on sociable robotics and the blurring of intimacy and solitude in Alone Together, and the ways that we are less connected than ever – more alone – even as we are more connected via our phones – alone together. Turkle’s updated 2011 version would benefit from being updated again for many reasons – not least among them the effect that the pandemic has had on technology and how we connect with others in the past few years.
With the pandemic, the sheen of loneliness takes on a different tint than it did even in 2011. We seem to be more “connected” than ever before, with Zoom meetings, icons indicating when we are away or available, or TikTok ready to mindlessly scroll on a lunch break. As Turkle writes, the newer generations “are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best.”[3] Turkle is wary of this idea – and of technology in general – but in many ways, Klara and the Sun asks us to rethink what the value judgments we assign to what we deem to be “real” or “authentic” connection. Even as we are perhaps more aware of our loneliness in a post-pandemic world, Ishiguro’s novel outlines the possibilities and limitations of technology to alleviate that loneliness.
Both of Ishiguro’s science fiction novels – Never Let Me Go (NLMG), published in 2005 and Klara and the Sun, published in 2021 – follow non-human protagonists in futures that grapple with technology advances. NLMG follows Kath, a clone who was created in order to be an organ donor for humans. Before organ donations the clones become carers, a role Kath becomes particularly attached to as she cares for her fellow, dying clones. Klara follows an “Artificial Friend”, Klara, who is a robot designed to provide friendship to a human child. The story unfolds as Klara is bought from a store and taken home to befriend a sick child. While medical technology has advanced in NLMG, in Klara, this advancement seems to be primarily in machinery technology.
In Klara and the Sun, Klara’s sole purpose as an Artificial Friend – AF – is to be a friend to the child whose family purchases her – to prevent loneliness. Klara is observant, more so than the other AFs in the shop where we meet her. She perceives the outside world carefully and sees all of these interactions physically through a grid; segmented squares partition her view, similar to windows– or, familiar to us in 2022, Zoom squares. This fragmentary way of seeing invokes the digital, as it also separates Klara from humans. It is not the only thing distinguishing her, however; every human Klara encounters within the pages of the novel is desperately lonely, and Klara does not simply watch, she listens. She is particularly un-lonely in a lonely world – a world chock-full of people and objects. While other characters amass as many things as possible to fill spaces in order to feel the illusion of connection, Klara only desires to fulfill her role as a friend.
Oddly enough, in this tech-dystopia, there seem to be few technological advances past the invention of the AFs themselves.[4] All the spaces encountered are remarkably familiar – a store, a living room, a kitchen, a junkyard. Other than Klara, the world of the digital is almost entirely absent. In other words, Klara represents the space of the digital in Ishiguro’s novel. She acts as an embodied symbol of what Patricia Lockwood terms “the portal” or the space of digital connections.[5] Klara exists in crowded physical spaces, and her job is solely to provide support and to be a friend. Klara – the digital – exists to counteract loneliness.
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The shop that sells AFs is where we first encounter Klara, waiting not-so-patiently for someone to buy her and take her home. Eventually, a girl chooses her – a girl named Josie, who is sick with an illness that remains a mystery for much of the novel. Klara is not lonely in the shop, but she is very solitary. Though she is surrounded by objects for sale – including other AFs – she does not seem programmed to be able to really bond with her fellow AF, Rosa. Klara chalks up this inability to befriend Rosa to Rosa’s poor observational tendencies, but it seems more likely that Klara is built to be a friend to humans, not other AFs. Even as Klara is surrounded by objects, she is isolated, but not lonely.
The juxtaposition between Klara and human children is explicit, as the manager of the store (whom Klara calls “Manager”) and Klara constantly discuss the loneliness of children while establishing Klara as distinctly un-lonely. When Klara asks Manager if a child by themselves would be lonely, Manager answers: “[a] child like that, with no AF, would surely be lonely.” “Yes, that too,” Manager said quietly. “Lonely. Yes.”[6] Later, when Klara is given the opportunity to be on display once more, Manager says: “[y]ou’ll be by yourself this time, but I know you won’t mind that.”[7] When Manager gives Klara this second opportunity, Klara sees Josie again, and not long after, Josie and her mother enter the store to purchase Klara and take her home with them. In many ways, the shop is similar to any modern tech store – one walks in empty-handed and walks out with the potential of connection.
∅
At Josie’s home, Klara calls the living room “The Open Plan,” and this is where interaction meetings between lifted children take place. Klara’s goal during her time at Josie’s home is to not only be a friend to Josie, but to convince the sun to heal Josie from her sickness. It’s not clear what this illness arises from, but much of the book is centered on what is called “lifting” – or what is then revealed to be genetic modification. Indeed, Josie herself has been lifted, but her best friend Rick is not. As a result of the lifting, parents of lifted children schedule “interaction meetings” – like a forced playdate, except the children aren’t friends. In Alone Together, Turkle writes, “[c]hildren need to be with other people to develop mutuality and empathy; interacting with a robot cannot teach these”.[8] But Ishiguro’s novel posits that the artificial interaction meetings are far less helpful than Josie spending time with Rick and Klara. In part three of the novel, Klara and Rick attend Josie’s interaction meeting – though Rick’s presence as an un-lifted child is taboo.
When Klara enters The Open Plan, she notes that her vision splits into two tiers comprising 24 boxes, and there is an “unpleasant tint” over a few children.[9] Klara’s abilities as an AF are prevalent during this scene as the other children want to test her features, while Klara stands stoically, ignoring them. The children speak about her the way we might speak about a toy or a phone: they hold her the wrong way, desire to throw her across the room, and when Josie says that Klara “notices things no one else does and stores them away,” they attempt to relentlessly test her memory.[10] As Peter Stallybrass asks in “Marx’s Coat, “[i]t has become a cliche to say that we should not treat people like things. But it is a cliche that misses the point. What have we done to things to have such contempt for them? And who can afford to have such contempt for them?”[11] Stallybrass’s quote asks us to rethink the contempt humans have for objects, and in many ways, Ishiguro echoes this sentiment. Readers experience this scene of ownership and contempt through the perspective of Klara, changing how we perceive and relate to the subject/object relationship within.[12] To each request Klara simply responds: “I’m sorry I’m unable to help,” similarly to how Siri responds when she cannot process a request.[13] In this case, it is not that Klara does not understand, but that her loyalty and friendship lie with Josie, and perhaps also that she resents the exhibition role she is forced to inhabit and exercises her agency to avoid it. The scene escalates until Rick intervenes, distracting the other children from Klara. This is perhaps one of the most beautiful things about Ishiguro’s novel: from this point on, Rick, Klara, and Josie become a friend group, a trio. Faced with the decision to choose between human friendship and an artificial one, Josie instead chooses both.
In a virtual interview with the Bay Area Book Festival, Ishiguro spoke about writing human characters and non-human, artificial intelligence characters. He argued that writing these characters were virtually the same because, “[a]ll characters in novels are artificial. This might come as terrible news to some readers, but they are. They’re all made up.”[14] Boundaries between the artificial and natural are likewise porous in the world of Klara. This trio of friends – Josie, Rick, and Klara – are all varying levels of “artificial”. Rick is the most “natural,” as he is un-lifted (not genetically altered), Klara is the most “artificial”, as she is manufactured and largely mechanical. Interestingly, Josie rides the line between the two as she is both human like Rick, but genetically altered and “lifted”, her DNA having been engineered. The boundaries of artificiality in Klara are not as easily defined as human/non-human, but rather Ishiguro plays with the places where they meet. Turkle’s quotation about developing empathy is turned on its head here as Josie’s empathy and mutuality are most often highlighted through Rick and Klara, not the children most biologically similar to her.
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Klara spends a lot of time in the second third of the book describing the kitchen of Josie’s home. Over the course of the novel, only women are depicted in the kitchen, save Rick, who appears once in the climactic scene where Klara notices the sun and believes Josie will finally be healed. Other than Rick’s one-time presence, the actors in the kitchen are all female: The Mother, Josie, Klara, Helen, and Melania, the housekeeper. Indeed, Klara seems to feel a certain solidarity with Melania, likening her to Manager – a role that Melania solidly rejects.[15] In many ways, Klara learns what stereotypical gender roles look like the longer she is out of the store. She assumes every woman will be a caretaker like Manager, but the more women she encounters, the less she seems able to categorize them.
That is not to say there is not an explicit critique of gender occurring in Ishiguro’s fictive kitchen. Indeed, Ishiguro takes the opportunity to draw comparisons between Klara and machinery in domestic spaces – particularly the vacuum and refrigerator. While Rick’s mother likens Klara to a vacuum in a moment of social awkwardness, Klara’s pull to the refrigerator seems to be partially her own. Though Melania does attempt to relegate Klara solely to the spot near the fridge, later Klara does so of her own accord: “I stood near the refrigerator where I could hear its hum.”[16] We may (and should) ask why Klara needs a gender at all – she is, after all, a machine not unlike the fridge or the blender. It is therefore worth noting that almost all of the main characters in Ishiguro’s novel are women. It seems important to me that the women congregate in the kitchen in Ishiguro’s novel – and that Klara feels comfort near the machinery. Even in their individual loneliness, there is a pull to at least be near others, a pull not unlike the pull of the digital or social media. The kitchen acts almost as a chat-room – a space where characters gather to form connections, often facilitated by the gentle listening that Klara provides.
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The final setting of Klara and the Sun is the junkyard where Klara sits alone on the ground amidst discarded objects and refuse. She has been deposited here after serving her purpose – Josie is all grown up and off to college now. However, instead of Klara being “reused” or recycled for another child, the Mother takes her to the landfill.
In the 2013 film Her, the denouement results in the revelation that the AI, Samantha, has been talking to – and in a relationship with – thousands of other humans beside the protagonist, Theodore. [17] In Her, this reusing or recycling signals an inauthentic connection to Theodore, initiating the breakdown of their relationship. In Klara, this concept of authentic connection is continued – Klara’s connection with Josie is signaled as authentic partially because she is not reused, she is not sent to be a friend to another child. Her lifespan is solely meant for Josie, and no one else.
As Klara sits, reflecting on her past and memories, first the yardman and then Manager ask Klara if she would like to be moved to another part of the yard where other discarded AFs reside. But Klara declines: “[n]o, thank you, Manager… I like this spot.” rejecting the offer to be near the other disused AFs and not seeming to be bothered by her desire to stay alone. [18] Intellectually, however, Klara understands loneliness. When Manager asks how Klara’s life was after leaving the store, she responds: “I believe I gave good service and prevented Josie from becoming lonely.” To which Manager says, “I’m sure you did. I’m sure she barely knew the meaning of loneliness with you there.”[19] In this quote, “there,” is Josie’s home – a home in which she is relegated mostly to her bed, due to her illness and what Rick spitefully writes is her mother’s “Courage”: “I wish I could go out and walk and run and skateboard and swim in lakes,” he writes, imitating Josie, “[b]ut I can’t because my mother has Courage. So instead I get to stay in bed and be sick.”[20] Though Josie’s isolation in the home is heightened due to her illness, she is not the only one who feels alone – we see her mother and Miss Helen struggling with loneliness as well. Even the manager of Klara’s store appears distinctly isolated – both as the only human in the store and as she walks by herself in the junkyard. The men in the novel – except for Rick (who, although he is present, is constantly pushed towards leaving) – are conspicuously absent, appearing only in very crowded scenes. Indeed, almost all of the men in the novel appear during the city scenes: Josie’s father, the artist, Miss Helen’s old flame. Women, much more so than men, are the lonely ones in Klara. That so much of the novel takes place in a domestic space – home, “there” as Manager says – reflects on the inherent isolation of these places.
The novel ends with Klara sitting, sorting through her memories to put them in order. Her memories are important to her in a way that suggests they are what keeps her company – she does not need to be with others to feel comforted by their memories. She is therefore not lonely: she is content. She has served her purpose –to be a friend to Josie – a purpose similar to the digital facilitating the comfort connections can bring. Klara is depicted as being solitary in the junkyard, but readers are familiar with the excessive number of objects typically present in junkyards – we know that the yard is full of refuse. Indeed, it would be easy to imagine a scene with Klara that is as crowded as one of Chris Jordan’s photographs of e-waste – in this case, Klara surrounded on all sides by other AFs.[21] However, Ishiguro purposefully does not place Klara with other AFs, asking us instead to reflect on this choice. What do our devices do when we upgrade to the next model, or no longer need their services? What landfill can we find them in, sitting out of our sight? What does it mean that Klara sits both in and apart from the consumptive waste?
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Post-pandemic, there has been a wave of pushback against digital connections – Zoom fatigue is real, tone in textual communication is difficult to decipher, we all just want a hug. During the pandemic, Bo Burnham released Inside, a Netflix special which was produced entirely inside his guest house in LA.[22] In a time when so many people were confined to and isolated in small spaces, we increasingly turned to digital connections and the expansive space of the internet to facilitate interactions with others. In one of his hit songs, “Welcome to the Internet,” he laments: “You know, it wasn’t always like this / Not very long ago / Just before your time / Right before the towers fell, circa ’99 / This was catalogs / Travel blogs / A chat room or two.”[23] In Burnham’s song, it is clear that the internet has evolved in the age of the pandemic, and not necessarily in a good way. In The New York Times, Tish Harrison Warner wrote, “[t]urn off your smartphone and have dinner with people around a table…the way back to ourselves, as individuals and a society, runs through old, earthy things.”[24] Warner invokes language of a landscape here, asking us to return to a specific and morally acceptable environment. There is a deep nostalgia to these comments – that the world was significantly better when children spent more time playing outside and people spent less time on TikTok. But to put a moral imperative on time and space – to suggest that one decade is better than another – misses the point. Humanity has always resisted change – Katy Waldman addresses resistance to technological advance as a newer version of the resistance to print books: “the hoary debate around ‘orality and literacy’ is back, sort of. This time we’ve cast the new technology as the unreliable flibbertigibbet and the relic-like printed book as the trusty source.”[25] To this point, it is worth it to remember that books are simply another type of technology, and tools that potentially isolate – or connect. Warner writes that, “we have to be cautious and wise about introducing devices into our lives that fundamentally change how humans have interacted since time immemorial.”[26] If we are talking about human interaction since “time immemorial,” the only thing separating books from phones is a charger. Framing technology purely as the cause of social decay overlooks the complexities of social life in the internet age.
Many of the articles discussed here assume that one can and should go outside or see someone else “face-to-face”. The danger in this assumption is that it relies on the ability to speak to other face-to-face – something that the pandemic took from us. And if the issue is that there is something better than technology, but that something is gone – impossible to reach for the time being – doesn’t that mean technology is what we are left with? The pandemic has changed the social landscape of face-to-face and ‘outside,’ often replacing it with digital landscapes. It is easy to decry this change as decay under the assumption that things can stay the same, as though the oceans aren’t rising, and our earth isn’t warming.
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Much of the technological advance that Turkle takes concern with in Alone Together is the concept of robotic carers for elderly people or children. This evokes Ishiguro’s earlier 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, which features clones who are created to be carers and then eventually organ donors for humans. Unlike Kath, the protagonist of Never Let Me Go, Klara is not named as a carer. She is labeled as a friend. What Turkle dismisses out of hand in her book is what Ishiguro is concerned with in 2021 in Klara and the Sun – friendship. Klara doesn’t care for Josie – she cares about Josie – a distinction that Turkle makes clear is impossible for robotic carers.
This is not to say that Kath does not care both for and about her patients, but Kath’s caring is perhaps less strange to us than Klara’s, because of the bodies they both inhabit. Both Kath and Klara are forced laborers – enslaved beings in a system that have invented and then sold them for capitalistic pursuits. They are both constrained to the system in which they were produced, but while Kath actively attempts to transcend her status to live freely as a human, Klara seems content. A lot of this can perhaps be chalked up to the difference in Kath and Klara’s bodies. Kath is a clone – she looks human, and she doesn’t know that she isn’t until she is told. Klara, on the other hand, is robotic. It’s unclear what Klara looks like exactly – while it seems that some of the AFs have hair, it is also clear that Klara’s inner workings are mechanical, and her vision is fragmented like an electronic screen. In many ways, it can be argued that Klara is programmed to be content, while Kath’s genetic modifications leave greater room for error and for hunger and desire.
∅
Klara, with Josie’s survival, avoided the fate the Mother had carved out for her: “continuing” Josie, that is, and taking on her likeness and mannerisms in a different, mechanical body. The theme of replacement surfaces often in the novel – specifically replacement of humans with AFs. As Josie tells Klara when they purchase her, her house is “weird,” and most of this oddness is a result of Josie’s deceased older sister, her own sickness, and her mother’s complicated relationship with grieving. Josie’s older sister, Sal, was lifted and grew sick as a result. Josie and Sal’s mother, in an attempt to not completely lose her daughter, arranged for Sal’s AF to “be” Sal. However, this AF was an earlier model than Klara, and something went awry, leading to the AF being sent away.
Josie’s mother learned from this incident and chose Klara specifically for her keen observational skills. In the case that Josie’s sickness progresses, and she dies, her mother’s plan is for Josie to be “continued” by Klara’s consciousness, who has learned how to mimic Josie. Klara’s consciousness will inhabit an artistic rendering or copy of Josie’s physical body to allow Josie’s mother to feel as if she is still present. Though this plan is ultimately abandoned due to Josie’s recovery, a significant amount of the book is dedicated to various characters’ reactions to this plan. While Josie’s father storms out of the artist’s studio in a fury, her mother is adamant that this is not only morally acceptable, but a better alternative than nothing. Josie meanwhile merely seems resigned. And Klara? Klara is willing to try anything, though she acknowledges in the junkyard that she does not think it would have worked.[27]
It would be really easy for something to go horribly wrong in Ishiguro’s new novel – indeed, even in Never Let Me Go, the mystery builds until Madame and Miss Emily explain the history of clones and carers, and that it is impossible for Kath to defer her donation and be with Tommy, whom she loves. In Klara, as Anita Felicelli writes, it seems as though Ishiguro is building up to a “bomb under the table” kind of tension – the audience is left waiting for the climax as more evidence and clues pile up that something sinister is occurring behind the scenes.[28] Felicelli seems to think that this “bomb under the table” is the Mother’s intent to replace Josie with Klara’s consciousness inside a new version of Josie’s body, but this argument is unconvincing. It is certainly alarming when the plan is finally revealed – but the bomb doesn’t go off. We see the bomb, we understand the bomb for what it is, but in the end the bomb is defused. This is for many reasons: Klara is asked if she would be willing to “continue” Josie (she is in not forced, in other words – other than by the implicit power dynamics), Klara has already exhibited a deep understanding and willingness to sacrifice herself for Josie, but after Josie’s recovery, this plot line has no need to play out. The bomb countdown is also remarkably unhurried – even after the reader figures out what the plan is, it goes largely unmentioned for the remainder of the book.
When Klara speaks to the manager in the junkyard, she tells her she doesn’t think that it would have worked for her to continue Josie.[29] The word “continue” is crucial and deliberate: Klara doesn’t use the word “become” or “replace”, which would signify a change or transformation. Instead, she uses the word “continue,” which implies an unaltered state, a smooth flow. Josie is and continues to be, Klara sliding into her body smoothly and without pause. Klara tells Manager that “continuing” Josie would have failed because, “[t]here was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”[30] Klara implies that it isn’t that Josie has something inherently special that Klara could not learn, but instead that the connection of others to her is what is irreplaceable or irreplicable.
As a result of this potential but ultimately deferred continuation of Josie with Klara, the ethics of Ishiguro’s new novel are much murkier than Never Let Me Go. Klara and the Sun outlines both the benefits of technological advance – friendship, less loneliness – and the potential dangers – the idea that all humans are easily replaceable – but even as it outlines both the positives and negatives, it refuses to commit to either. At the end of the novel, Klara is alone, but content, and Josie is grown and healthy. It is perhaps too simplistic to say that any of the characters are happy in the end, but they are not unhappy either. Therefore, Ishiguro presents a kind of tech neutrality – presenting the possibilities while asking the readers to grapple with the ethics. Perhaps this is the sort of attitude we need – not to distinguish if technology is good or evil, not to confer an ethical or value judgment on it, but rather to recognize it as what it is: a tool that can be used for different purposes.
I am not saying that the digital does not have its own distinct and dangerous set of problems – higher rates of anxiety and depression are not to be overlooked.[31] Yet, Ishiguro’s novel – and Klara’s characterization– show that “all humans are lonely. At least potentially,” and that the digital has the potential to be used as a tool of connection or as a system of further entrenched isolation.[32 It is easy to bypass the positive and the beautiful parts of the internet for the dark places; sometimes we cannot see the bridge for the trolls. Social media might make loneliness easier to see, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been there.
The moment that drenches Ishiguro’s novel in dread is the potential that Josie will be “continued” with Klara’s consciousness – a moment that ultimately doesn’t happen but is important for the implications that accompany it. For example, the casing of Klara’s robotic body or Josie’s human one signals a different type of connection – a different way people are treated. Klara’s robotic body signals that she can be thrown by kids across the room, indeed her body deems a certain type of abuse as acceptable. Josie’s body, however, indicates feeling and emotions, her human body rendering a different type of connection as appropriate.
Our bodies are spaces, an environment, a house for our soul. In Klara’s case, her body signals to others that she is distinctly not human and therefore she is treated with contempt, with apathy, or as a tool to be used. When it becomes possible for Klara’s consciousness to be transplanted into Josie’s newly made body, Klara is treated differently. Josie’s mother begins to treat her with love and respect, and Josie’s father asks her questions instead of ignoring her. The spaces in Ishiguro’s novel are deeply familiar to us – a kitchen, a shop, a junkyard – but perhaps the most foreign space of all is Klara’s own body. Like the digital, it holds possibilities for positive and negative connections – her body is the site of potential, but it is potential that is unfamiliar to us, and therefore frightening. For Josie, though, her connection with Klara is unproblematic. Klara helps her to be less lonely, artificial or not, full stop.
Indeed, I find parts of the internet are far more caring than in my real life, because in the expanse of the internet you can cultivate a space that’s all your own. Teenagers feel comfortable coming out casually on TikTok, strangers can find others to share in their specific grief and reconnecting with lost relatives is easier than ever before.[33] Often, in the digital landscape, you can carve out your own garden, your own space, that is safe for you to be who you are and to find others like you. Like Klara, sitting in her junkyard, sifting through the fragments of her memories, so I swipe through old photos each morning – remembering and connecting and feeling slightly less alone, in what often seems like a very lonely world.
End Notes
[1] Kazou Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. (New York, Knopf, 2021), 216.
[2] Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: NY, Basic Books, 2011), 1. https://bookshop.org/books/alone-together-why-we-expect-more-from-technology-and-less-from-each-other-9780465093656/9780465093656?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-daUBhCIARIsALbkjSb2gzw9zU2HcFczAdbZkVOJlGcuhgsS4Q7lxdSHl0NTI721fXPTuBUaAitGEALw_wcB
[3] Turkle, Alone Together, 17.
[4] Josie owns an “oblong” on which she plays games or does schoolwork, but this seems similar to an iPad, and she does not seem to use it for communicating with friends or socializing. Her best friend, Rick, also builds drone birds, but these seem similar to current technology.
[5] Jenna Mahale, “Open the Portal: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood.” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 16, 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/open-the-portal-a-conversation-with-patricia-lockwood/
[6] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 11.
[7] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 37.
[8] Turkle, Alone Together, 56.
[9] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 72.
[10] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 78.
[11] Peter Stallybrass “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 203.
[12] Stallybrass’s question of “who can afford to have contempt,” is also directly relevant here, as “lifting” requires money, and it is implied that Rick and his mother are not as well-off as Josie’s family.
[13] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 79.
[14] Lauren Sheehan-Clark, “Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro unpacks his writing process at 7th Bay Area Book Festival,” The Daily Californian, May 6 2021, https://www.dailycal.org/2021/05/06/nobel-prize-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-unpacks-his-writing-process-at-7th-bay-area-book-festival/
[15] In fact, Klara refers to her as “Melania Housekeeper” as if her job is a part of her name. Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 51.
[16] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 89.
[17] Her, directed by Spike Jonze (Warner Bros. Pictures, December 18 2013), film.
[18] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 302.
[19] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 300.
[20] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 131.
[21] Chris Jordan. “Portfolio: Chris Jordan,” Art Works for Change, https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/chris-jordan/
[22] Bo Burnham, Inside, directed by Bo Burnham (Netflix, May 30, 2021) film.
[23] Bo Burnham, 2021, “Welcome to the Internet,” disc 2, song 4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
[24] Tish Warren. “We’re in a Loneliness Crisis: Another Reason to Get Off Our Phones,” New York Times, May 1 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/opinion/loneliness-connectedness-technology.html
[25] Katy Waldman, “Reading Insecurity,” Slate, September 8, 2014, https://slate.com/culture/2014/09/reading-insecurity-the-crippling-fear-that-the-digital-age-has-left-you-unable-to-read-deeply-and-thoughtfully.html
[26] Warren, “We’re in a Loneliness Crisis”.
[27] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 301.
[28] Anna Felicelli, “Bomb Under the Table: On Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 5, 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bomb-under-the-table-on-kazuo-ishiguros-klara-and-the-sun/
[29] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 301.
[30] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 302.
[31] Liu yi Lin, Jaime E. Sidani, Ariel Shensa, Ana Radovic, Elizabeth Miller, Jason B. Colditz, Beth L. Hoffman, Leila M. Giles, and Brian A. Primack, “Association between Social Media Use and Depression among U.S. Young Adults,” in Depression and Anxiety, 33, no. 4 (April 2016): 323-331. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/
[32] Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 255.
[33] Samantha Allen, “Coming Out on TikTok is Chaotic, Weird, Hilarious and Heartwarming,” them, October 11, 2019, https://www.them.us/story/coming-out-on-tiktok