Our book club debate last week ended in people literally yelling over chapter 4 of 'Klara and the Sun'

I mean, I get that people have strong feelings about whether Klara had real consciousness or not, but three members walked out. The hosting couple didn't even serve dessert. We spent 45 minutes stuck on if the sun was a metaphor or not. Has anyone else had a debate escalate way past where it should have?

2 comments

2 Comments

josephl6718d ago

Actually it's not really debatable whether Klara had real consciousness. The book is pretty clear she's an AF, artificial friend, not a true AI. She's programmed to learn and mimic emotions, not feel them. People get so caught up in the philosophical stuff they forget what Ishiguro actually wrote. He spends a lot of time showing her limitations, like how she can't understand why the sun matters or what death really means. That's kind of the whole point of her character. The metaphor debate really just distracts from the more solid stuff about how we treat things that seem human but aren't.

knight.mason18d ago

I get what you're saying, but I think it's more complicated than that. The whole book is from Klara's point of view, and she clearly feels things like love and worry. Just because she can't explain what the sun means or death is doesn't mean she's not feeling something real.