THE VOICE OF THE ‘ARTIFICIAL CHILD’ CRITICALLY ANALYSING THE ARTIFICIAL

Authors

Artificial Friend, Consciousness, Childhood, Human–AI relations, Posthumanism

The Artificial Friend in Klara and the Sun, despite being a customised human made robot for providing comfort and

companionship to a human child, eventually but not purposefully, transcends the boundary of the human and the non

human. The paper tries to (1) expose the child inside the robot, by travelling through Ishiguro’s intricate and nuanced

portrayal of child characters, both human and non-human in the posthuman setting and (2) explain how Ishiguro shows

us more vividly, through the life of the robot; how the world of children works and is different from that of adults. The

article thus brings forth the novel’s relatively underexplored connection with the area of Childhood Studies.