This story is a challenge to its reader. Do we really take the time to remember that the wars of our shared human history happened to real people during their real lives? Sometimes, it is tempting to categorize human history as an academic relic or something, without remembering what the words literally mean. That's what motivates Klara—from her, the war stole everything. It stole her brother and her boyfriend, and the painful knowledge of those horrible stories, like the trench that stole Eamon's life, it's so much different to Klara than the way history students might understand it. To her, it was real life.
The novelist designed Klara's character this way on purpose—because Klara can serve as an argument, to challenge the reader's assumptions. Klara is practically reaching through the page to shake her reader by the shoulders to say, "Please remember the dead!" That's why she carved Eamon's face into the statue.
This is what the title suggests, too. The Stone Carvers are literally Klara, the androgynous carpenter, and her overseer, Walter Allward (a real person). This partnership between a real character and an imaginary, fictitious character suggests the author's own intents, to partner fiction with real life history for a specific purpose. What purpose? To make the reader challenge their understanding of World War I. Klara's character is simply asking, does the reader truly remember the horror, or do they just remember the facts?
