Nearly every character in Klara and the Sun is working to stave off loneliness. Preventing the loneliness of isolated children is the AF’s programmed purpose. Chrissy, Rick, Paul, and Josie are all motivated in different ways by a fear of loneliness. Paul avoids loneliness by joining a homogenous community. Manager wanders the junkyard in her retirement, hoping to come across old AFs she once knew. Vance still has feelings for Helen but humiliates her in retaliation for the loneliness she made him feel. Helen, on the other hand, has chosen loneliness, telling Klara “there are all kinds of other very good reasons why, in a life like mine, one might prefer loneliness. I’ve often made such a choice in the past” (152). She accepts loneliness because it might mean a better life for Rick and because it allows her to avoid her guilt and past mistakes.

Chrissy plans to replace her sick daughter with an android if she dies. She has felt grief and loneliness before, when Sal died, and desperately wants to avoid it a second time, telling Klara “I came through it with Sal, but I can’t do it again” (210). Extreme measures taken by the adults in Klara and the Sun reveal the lengths to which people will go to avoid feeling lonely.

Rick and Josie are both afraid of losing their friendship and make promises to stay together forever. Each feels resentment and fear of abandonment. Josie worries that Rick isn’t trying hard enough to get into Atlas Brookings, their only hope of staying in the same professional class, and Rick fears that Josie will change to fit in with her stuffy peers. Ironically, Rick and Josie’s “plan” turns out to be a healthier strategy than those concocted by adults. Rick and Josie have grown apart by the end of the novel, but they still have a mutual understanding, and the love they share will still be a part of each of them.

Over and over again, Klara expresses hope that Josie will get better, despite her declining health. Her hope for Josie’s future is a product of her general positive attitude and of her faith in the benevolence and omnipotence of the sun. Her belief is received in different ways by different people. After leaving Mr. McBain’s barn the first time, Klara tells Rick, “I believe there’s now reason for hope. Hope for Josie […] but first I must perform a task” (166). Rick doesn’t push her for more information. He is motivated to help Klara because he too wants to help Josie and is inspired by Klara’s hope. Similarly, Paul goes along with Klara’s plan to sabotage the Cootings Machine, despite having no idea what the machine has to do with Josie. Just as Klara has faith in the sun, Rick and Paul put their faith in Klara without trying to understand her machinations, which Klara recognizes in her second plea to the sun: “You must have seen how the Father too helped and did his utmost, even though he knew nothing about the Sun’s kind agreement, because he saw my hope and placed his faith in it” (269).

Conversely, Chrissy is sometimes insulted by Klara’s positivity. Her hopes were dashed when Sal died, and she therefore sees hope as a foolish coping mechanism, exclaiming to Klara—as the AI imitates Josie—at Morgan’s Falls, “You think you know more than the doctors? More than I do? Your sister made promises too. But she couldn’t keep them. Don’t you do the same” (105). Later, however, in the car, she calms down, and allows herself to hope: “You’re an intelligent AF. Maybe you can see things the rest of us can’t. Maybe you’re right to be hopeful” (108). Chrissy is often caught between the hope she wants to feel and the rationality she uses to defend herself. Mr. Capaldi’s technological plan, which Chrissy eventually rejects, is the antithesis to hope and faith. In a Christian context, Capaldi’s commitment to science is an idolatrous rejection of faith.

Klara and the Sun leaves the reader questioning, like Rick, whether the sun and Klara’s faith really had a hand in Josie’s recovery. Ishiguro gives no definite evidence either way, because the nature of faith is defined by its unanswerability. When Josie recovers, Klara continues to believe that she was healed by the sun, but nobody will know for sure.

Paradoxically, Ishiguro uses an android narrator as a unique lens to explore the limits of human perception. If her time in the AF store is analogous to her childhood, then the anecdotal scenes she perceives there are the events that make a strong impression on her young mind. Klara witnesses customers and pedestrians displaying complex emotions. Her natural curiosity leads her to observe more carefully, and thus she develops her keen sense of emotional literacy. Klara is technically only a year or two old when she is bought by Chrissy and Josie, and the AF store is the only world she has known. She has to observe and learn every new environment, such as Chrissy’s house and the paths between the houses and the barn. Klara sees the beggar and his dog rise from the ground after the sun shines on them and concludes that the sun must have raised them from the dead. To the reader, this may seem like an absurd deduction, despite its being made by a rational, computerized system. Klara’s errors in perception reflect the degree to which sentient beings misunderstand their surroundings.

Ishiguro also shows the fragility of perception, as when Klara is low on P-E-G- Nine solution and struggles to make sense of the crowd outside the theater. More broadly, Klara’s technological limitations cause her impressions of the natural world to be faulty. This differentiates her from other androids across literature and film, who tend to understand the material world to a superhuman degree but lack emotional intelligence. On the contrary, Klara’s perceptions of the material world are like that of a child, while her emotional intelligence is highly advanced. This raises the question of why her designers did not add the most basic facets of human knowledge—like the purpose of the sun—to her programming. Perhaps by limiting Klara’s perceptive ability, this gives her a sense of wonder about the world which in turn makes her a more effective emotional companion.