关键词: 石黑一雄, 《克拉拉与太阳》, 报废, 技术官僚, 资本主义

Abstract: In this article, I argue that Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) reveals obsolescence to be a central preoccupation of his fiction. Further, I contend, obsolescence not only furnishes Ishiguro's novels with content but also informs their narrative structures and language. A brief look at his two early novels, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989), shows how their narrators are overtaken by the unplanned obsolescence that results from realignments of imperial systems in the time of postwar capitalism. But in Klara and the Sun, as in Never Let Me Go (2005), the obsolescence experienced by Ishiguro's narrators is planned, that is, it is the fully expected outcome of contemporary social systems run on technocratic lines. After exploring, in detail, the formal and stylistic means by which Klara and the Sun articulates its overarching theme, I suggest that Ishiguro's new book encourages us to ask searching questions about the state and status of the novel as a literary genre in a 21^st-century culture of planned obsolescence: the means by which capitalism generates, sustains, and even expands consumer demand by producing commodities that, sooner or later, must be replaced or updated.

Key words: Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, obsolescence, technocracy, capitalism