Feeling beyond Flesh: An Affective Exploration of Klara and the Sun

Abstract

This research reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) through affect theory, arguing that the novel displaces emotional authenticity from its human characters onto Klara, an artificial companion designed to serve them. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies and Brian Massumi’s theory of pre-personal affect, the study treats Klara’s devotion to Josie and her reverence for the Sun as forms of unmediated, non-transactional feeling, set against a human world where care has been commodified, delegated or withheld along lines of genetic privilege. Using close textual analysis as its method, the research traces how characters such as Chrissie and Mr. Capaldi manage, substitute or engineer emotion rather than experience it, while Klara circulates hope and sacrifice with no expectation of return. Positioned against existing scholarship that reads Klara mainly through questions of AI ethics, moral status or the human/nature divide, this study argues that the novel’s central irony is affective before it is technological: the figure with the least claim to feeling is the one who still knows how. Klara and the Sun, the analysis concludes, diagnoses what late-capitalist life has done to human affect, using Klara’s capacity for care as the measure of what her creators have lost.