Summary
In Part Five, Josie begins to weaken in the days after they come back from the city. Klara is supposed to help Rick with his studies, but he mostly wants to linger near Josie.
He and Klara talk about Josie, and Rick says he thought Klara said there was a special way Josie would get better but now he is not hopeful. Klara does not give specifics but acknowledges she is a little disappointed too. She has one final idea to get to Mr. McBain’s barn again, which Rick agrees to help her with that evening. She tells him she will have to offer apologies to the Sun but also needs to be able to assure the Sun that the love between Rick and Josie is real and true and lasting. Rick replies that of course it is.
That evening as the Sun is setting, Rick takes Klara to the barn and leaves her there alone. She sees the Sun’s rays streaming in and apologizes for disturbing him but says she is here on an important matter. She says (in her mind) that she knows she has no right to be here and that she failed to stop Pollution. This was foolish, as she underestimated her task. It was her error and no one else’s; he should not hold Josie accountable. She’s fine that she lost some of her fluid and would lose all of it if it meant helping Josie.
The Sun’s rays are intense and she can barely look at them. She speaks of Coffee Cup Lady and Raincoat Man and the way they found each other, of the way he saved Beggar Man and his dog, of how the Sun must be happy about what he did for them. She knows favoritism is not ideal but she vouches for the love between Rick and Josie.
Her attention is caught by the Sun’s reflection in a corner in a few sheets of glass. In the glass the Sun is not just one image but several, and has many different expressions. Finally they fade. She thanks him and leaves.
The next few days see no improvement in Josie. Dr. Ryan and the Mother argue about whether she should go to the hospital. All of the adults are immensely tired.
One day the sky grows extremely dark after breakfast. Rick arrives and Josie is sleeping, her breath shallow. The Mother brings Rick into the kitchen and asks him if he thinks he’s won. He is confused. She explains that he did not get lifted and Josie did, and now look at what has happened. Perhaps he feels like he won, but Josie was always excited for life and needed a real future, so this is what she had to do for her. If Rick thinks he won, then he won a small, mean thing.
Rick’s face darkens. He tells her that last Thursday when he was here, Josie gave him a message to give her mother: she loves her and has always loved her; she is glad she was lifted and would not have it any other way; she would do what her mother did in a heartbeat; and she was the best mother.
The Mother exhales in surprise. But Klara interrupts and yells that the Sun is coming out and they have to get to Josie right away. Confused and fearful, they run upstairs with Klara. Melania is there, trying to close the curtains but Klara tells her to stop and that she must open them and let the Sun do what he does best.
Rick intuits what she is saying and helps her open them. The Sun pours in and illuminates Josie’s entire bed. Everyone watches as Josie stirs and asks what is going on with the blinds. It looks like she is better, and the Mother asks how she feels. Josie is confused and says she does actually feel a bit better, if kind of dizzy. The Mother says to assume nothing and that they will take this one step at a time.
In Part Six, Josie not only gets stronger, but grows up. She prepares for college and is home less. Rick does not want to go to Atlas Brookings anymore but buys a car and works on his own designs. One day he asks Klara about what happened that day with Josie and the Sun, and she replies that it was such a special favor and she does not dare speak of it. Rick understands. Klara ventures a question about Rick and Josie, as they do not seem as close anymore even though they are kind to each other. Rick acknowledges that Klara must be worried about this and explains that “When you passed it on that Josie and I really loved each other, that was the truth at the time. No one can claim you misled or tricked them. But now we’re no longer kids, we have to wish each other the best and go our different ways. It couldn’t have worked out, me trying to go to college, trying to compete with all those lifted kids. I've got my own plans now, and that’s how it should be. But that was no lie, Klara. And in a funny way, it still isn’t a lie now” (288). When Klara asks for clarification, he says he will always love Josie and will probably always be searching for someone like her. He wonders if Klara will be okay when Josie leaves, and she tells him the Mother is always kind to her.
Sitting here now, Klara admits she knows that the Sun would not feel cheated or misled, that he understood the dynamics of the love between Josie and Rick. And maybe they will meet again like Coffee Cup Lady and Raincoat Man.
Time passes. Josie is getting closer to going off to college and often has friends over. Klara finds herself spending more time in the Utility Room to be out of the way. Josie finds her there one day, and asks if she can see out. She then starts to clear away a space and set up a way for Klara to look outside, which she knows Klara loves to do. Klara is grateful.
One day Mr. Capaldi comes by and the Mother asks Klara if she will speak to him because he has some questions. The Mother is quiet and seemingly dismayed. Mr. Capaldi tells Klara that these days people are more hostile towards AFs and don’t like not knowing how they come to their decisions and behaviors. He thinks it is time to fight back. People are worried since they do not know what is under the hood, so it is time to show them. It is time to reverse-engineer and learn what they can from AFs. Klara can be one of the AFs who lets scientists figure out exactly how they work.
But finally the Mother jumps in and stops him, and says matter-of-factly that Klara deserves better than this, deserves her “slow fade” (294). She steps between Klara and Mr. Capaldi. He sighs. He says he knows she is still mad at him for years back with Josie, and it is not fair because she came to him.
The days before Josie’s departure for college are tense but exciting. Josie invites Klara into her room and talks to her about her fears, and says that she’ll share with Klara some of her goals if Klara is still there when she comes home for Christmas. This is one of the few allusions Josie makes to Klara’s potential departure.
The day Josie leaves, she gives Klara a long hug and says she knows Klara might not be there when she gets back, and she wants her to know she's been great.
Klara is now in the Yard, which is where she’s been telling this story. Her memories are overlapping occasionally now, but she can still sort them if need be. Here she can watch the Sun’s journey unimpeded. She appreciates the order in the Yard, even if it seems messy. A kind yardman asks if she wants to be near other AFs on the south side, and she declines.
One day a visitor arrives, and she sees it is Manager. Manager is pleased to see her and says she had hoped to find Klara here on her visits to see discarded items. She asks about her home and is pleased Klara did so well. They did not go as well for Rosa, she says.
Klara talks about how happy she was being with Josie, and how she’d been prepared to “continue” her. This bemuses Manager at first, but Klara explains that she does not think she would ever reach what the people who loved Josie felt in their hearts. She has since realized that there is something special in Josie, but “it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her” (302).
Manager understands what she means. She compliments Klara on being one of the finest AFs she’s had. Klara adds that the Sun was very kind to her, and Manager is not surprised.
Manager says goodbye and Klara says goodbye as well. Manager walks away.
Analysis
Unfortunately, Josie does not improve after they return from the city, where Klara had destroyed the machine and hoped to secure the Sun’s commitment to curing Josie. Instead, Josie worsens and it seems as if she truly might die. Klara remains tenacious, though, unable to give up on her belief that the Sun will do as she asks. This time she is even humbler than before, apologizing for coming into his place, for failing to end pollution, and for assuming that he would grant favoritism to Josie. But she still asks him to consider Josie as an innocent, and to let her and Rick “go together into their adult lives just as they wished for in their kind picture” (271).
Amazingly, the Sun does seem to listen. Not long after the third attempt, everyone is at home when the Sun starts to come out after a period of darkness. Klara does not give us insights into what she has realized (another example of her often opaque narration) but shouts to run upstairs to Josie and let the Sun in. The rays fully illuminate Josie; Klara comments that “the Sun continued to relentlessly shine on her” until Josie sat up with “an obvious new strength to the way she’d maneuvered herself” (280). This is it—Josie is healed. We learn in the next section that she overcame her sickness and became a normal kid, ready to head off to college. We don’t know exactly what happened, and Ishiguro doesn’t intend for us to. It is enough that Klara’s love for Josie has always shone as brightly as the sun.
Despite everything Klara does for Josie, she is not a permanent member of the family, and when Josie goes to college, it isn’t long before Klara gets dumped in the scrapyard to slowly fade away. Done with her task, she is trying to get her memories in order (and it’s why she is telling this story to us), but she’s beginning to wear down. She notes that “Over the last few days, some of my memories have started to overlap in curious ways” (297), and also that such composite memories make her forget that “I am, in reality, sitting here in the yard, on this hard ground” (298). Christopher Au writes of Klara’s time in the yard through the lens of nostalgia: “Klara’s memories also have an ‘untidy identity,’ and need to be organized carefully in order for some meaning to emerge. Klara’s purpose in doing this is comfort: the reflective nostalgia and familiarity of her memories soothe her enough that she wishes to remain alone to revel in the emotion. Even when Manager offers her the chance to stand near other AF’s in the Yard, Klara forgoes companionship… Klara is not seeking to revive or relive her experiences in the store by moving closer to AF’s she does not know. Even though she has lost contact with everyone she has known, Klara is content to experience reflective nostalgia in her twilight, using her final days to remember her life in the Sun.”
It is here in this yard that Klara meets with Manager again, and tells her what she’s come to realize about Josie and the question of self that the Father, the Mother, and Mr. Capaldi debated—that there is something special about a human being, but it is found in the people that love them, not the person themselves. Katie Fitzpatrick notes wryly that “Klara delivers this moral with full, nauseating sincerity, but it is in fact doubly tragic. First, this moral reminds us that Klara herself has been excluded from acts and feelings of genuine love, and second, it signals that she has not really understood the other characters in the novel, whose expressions of love are deeply flawed.”
Lindsay Bartowksi agrees that the end of the novel is not as sweet as many critics read it, for “While [Klara] is able to successfully protect her charge from harm, and do so through methods of her own imagination and more impressive social-emotional skills than many of the novel’s characters, her work does little to mend the deep social ills that produced a need for AFs in the first place. Even after she’s saved Josie, little community exists among either adults or children, pollution continues to do harm at a rapid rate, class inequalities are reproduced by a new generation, and fascists stay fascist.” Similarly, Yiqun Xiao claims that “Klara’s retrospective narrative is fundamentally a rearrangement of her memories in order to serve her wish to relive her life as a happy and successful AF. In the final pages of the novel, Klara says that as she goes through her memories and places them ‘in the right order,’ she forgets ‘for long moments that I am, in reality, sitting here in the Yard, on this hard ground’ (306, 302). Therefore, Klara not only wants her audience to remember her as the AF that lived a meaningful life, but she also tries to deny to herself the fact that her desire to be loved was never fulfilled, and that what awaits her is the lonely death that all AFs must face.”
