A Study Of Ethical Choices In Klara And The Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro(1954-),winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature,is a renowned contemporary Japanese-British writer.Since the publication of A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World,he has been committed to the idea of creating universal literary works that transcend single historical and cultural categories.His latest work,Klara and the Sun,is an exploration of the crisis of subjectivity,the separation of body and emotion,and whether the human heart is replicable in the posthuman era.Taking ethical literary criticism as a theoretical framework,this thesis aims to explain the rewriting of the ethical environment on the basis of the current social situation in the novel.And it also intends to interpret the ethical choices made by the human and non-human characters in the ethical predicament and the enlightening meaning from the dimension of the technological society and the emotion.Starting from the generating factors and resolution of the ethical predicament in the novel,this thesis takes exploring the ethical choices of humans and non-human as the core subject.And it explains Ishiguro`s philosophical thinking on the ethical subject in the post-human era.To begin with,the novel presents Ishiguro`s priori conception of the near-future society,in which technology intervenes in human society at many levels,causing social anxiety and a crisis of survival.And changes in social conditions weaken the emotional experience stemming from interpersonal interaction,resulting in the alienation of ethical relationships among people.Then,the ethical predicament and its core question of the novel are analyzed by exploring the choices of Josie`s parents on the continuation plan.Although the continuation plan can continue the parents` love for their daughter and avoid the disintegration of their family,it ignores the essence of parental love,which lies in interpersonal emotional interaction based on kinship.Furthermore,Ishiguro reveals the cruel situation that it is difficult for human beings to make choices in the ethical predicament under the control of instrumental rationality.Therefore,Ishiguro employed the post-human field to juxtapose the primitive sun myth with modern technology,breaking the shackles of human-machine coexistence in the conventional science fiction.He entrusted an Artificial Friend with ethical consciousness,providing a new way for human beings to get out of the ethical predicament.As a writer of world literature,Ishiguro expressed his forward-looking thinking about the fate of human beings and deep concern about human beings trapped in the mire of technology in the novel.Klara and the Sun conveys Ishiguro`s worry about the problems arising from the development of the current society by analyzing the ethical choices of humans and nonhuman robot.Among these,Ishiguro pays particular attention to how human beings maintain the objectivity and uniqueness of their intrinsic nature after technology breaks through the boundaries of the subject and intervenes in the human body.In addition,the novel presents his reflection on the choices people make in the face of the constraints of technology when they move from the stage of ethical choice to the stage of scientific choice in the near future.It has certain inspirations for today’s society on how to properly manage the relationship between man and technology in the development of science and technology.