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Antonella De Blasio, eCampus University, ItalyAbstract
Adopting the approach of cognitive narratology, this study examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021) as a text that reflects on the concepts of the human and of identity, and on contemporary forms of relationship and empathy. In the near future imagined by Ishiguro, a society dominated by technological progress and genetic engineering entrusts the education and emotional support of young people to artificial companions, within a context marked by social isolation and relationships increasingly mediated by technology. Through the first-person focalization of Klara – the Artificial Friend endowed with advanced observational capacities, purchased to assist Josie, an ill girl – the novel stages a process of mental-state construction, showing how identity and subjectivity are formed through practices of recognition, care, and mutual dependence. Klara’s narrating voice constitutes a cognitive device that prompts the reader to simulate an artificial mind engaged in interpreting human minds. The processes of mind-modelling reveal that subjectivity is the outcome of relational processes of interpretation between consciousnesses. From this perspective, Josie’s identity is not replicable – as Capaldi’s technological project presupposes – but is a relational configuration distributed across the affects and bonds that surround her. The novel thus dismantles the human/non-human dichotomy, redefining subjectivity as a phenomenon emerging from cognition rooted in affective, environmental, and social relations, rather than as an internal property of an isolated subject.
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Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Humanities - Literature/Literary Studies*
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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