“If you go on reading, everything becomes clearer”: reader responses to (un)cooperative narration in Klara and the Sun

Abstract

The present contribution offers a twofold pragmatic literary stylistic analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction novel Klara and the Sun in order to understand how readers engage with non-human, uncooperative narration. Firstly, the narrative style of the text will be analysed in terms of its lexical choices, deictic features, underlying presuppositions, and its adherence to Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Secondly, reader response data will be used to examine how a group of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) readers evaluate and engage with the book’s narrative style. The novel is narrated in the first person by the title character, Klara, an AF (artificial friend), an artificial intelligence avatar companion to a young girl in a dystopian society. Klara’s non-human point of view and her peculiar experience of the world often give rise to Gricean maxim clashes and infringements. Exploring “uncooperative narration”, mind style and narrative indeterminacy, the analysis will examine extracts from the text which require reader inferencing. Furthermore, the reader-response data gathered from a questionnaire reveals the impact of the narrative style on the EFL students’ engagement with and understanding of the novel.