Tracing the roots of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: an uncanny perspective on loveless humanity

Abstract

This master’s thesis identifies and discusses how the roots of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun are grounded in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Comparisons are drawn between the two novels in terms of thematical concerns, societal critiques, and, principally, the composition of the specific juxtaposition between the human and the nonhuman, which grants the reader a particular lens through which ideological and moral issues threatening modern society become accentuated. In fictions like these, the reader is invited to sympathise with the nonhuman Others, as they come to display qualities and capacities indicative of human nature, which the human characters of the novels simultaneously lack. In this sense of paradoxicality, the artificial lives of both novels act as means of estrangement, creating an uncanny perspective on both the novels and the readers’ societies. The issues and criticisms which this juxtaposition illuminates include how human societies increasingly come to resemble the machines and artificial beings they create, as capitalist trends of conformity cause them to stray further and further from what is essential human nature.