Artificial Feelings in Klara and the Sun

This chapter investigates the meaning of emotions when bodies are not composed of flesh, when an “artificial friend” powered by solar energy serves at the pleasure of a future elitist family. Even as Klara exhibits a human-seeming vocabulary, sensitivity, and mobility, Ishiguro triggers the reader to question her relation to the human “soul” which Ishiguro believes was intrinsic to Dostoevsky’s world view, a word related to what Panksepp and Damasio name the embodied “core self.”