Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? AI Sentience in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? AI Sentience in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Timothy Christensen

Otterbein University

Abstract

Since the post-World War II era, self-conscious artificial intelligence has been a popular trope for economic and social injustice. Within this tradition, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021) stages the problem of the denial of AI sentience in the service of human self-interest. Ishiguro frames the android Klara’s sentience as uncertain, and therefore subject to acknowledgment or denial based on the interest of her human masters, through its positioning as a rewriting of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817), the story of a young man who falls in love with an automaton. Both “The Sandman” and Freud’s commentary on this text in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919) are embedded in Ishiguro’s novel. Ishiguro’s story pressures the reader to develop ways to determine whether the titular character, an android named Klara, is sentient. A close reading of the text suggests that we adopt a standard of subjectivity similar to “extimacy,” Lacan’s interpretation of “the uncanny,” to determine the subjectivity or personhood of intelligent machines. Within the novel, it is the android protagonist and narrator, Klara, who most clearly articulates the concept of the subjective uniqueness of all social beings in these terms.

About the Author:

Tim Christensen earned a PhD in English from Michigan State University. He has published articles on the ways that racial ideology shaped representational practices in modernist fiction, the meanings of race in contemporary culture, cannibalism in literature, critiques of consumerism in contemporary science fiction, and detective fiction. He teaches literature and writing at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.

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Published: 2025 – 07 – 01