Artificial Friends and Becoming-Machine: A Digital Humanities and Posthuman Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun presents a society with dormant layers that obscure the issues surrounding the human and the alterity of machines. With its technological advancements in gene editing and androids called Artificial Friends, Ishiguro’s novel presents a posthuman world where the posthuman concept of becoming-machine is seemingly mired in aporia. This paper attempts to examine this notion of “becoming-machine” and its entanglements in Ishiguro’s novel with digital humanities tools, Google Books NGram Viewer and Voyant Tools and a posthuman lens. I argue the claim that the diegetic process of child lifting and Klara’s sense of ethics, reveal the seemingly intertwined, but distinct notions of becoming within the text. One, becoming the machine, is a tangible, yet precarious process of humanity losing their ethical sense. While the other is one where Artificial Friends are ethically, in a posthuman sense, gaining ethical agency, or becoming-machine.