Blog 3!!!!!

            Friendship – in literature, less about supporting each other and having fun together, and 

more about proceeding the plot. As B.D. McClay writes, “when dramatized, friendship 

often becomes retrospective: it’s about the friends you left behind.”

     

     Of course, no-one expects fictional stories to have an accurate and life-like representation

of friendship. However, why must friendship, in all of its positive, blissful pleasures and 

spiteful drama, be reduced to the gap it leaves after it’s gone? McCray brings up an 

interesting point on the under-representation of friendship in literature: friendship in and of

 itself can be distant without suffering. “How do you tell a story about a relationship that 

remains, at heart, stable and that has no endpoint toward which to go?” In addition to that, 

friendship is at its most passionate during childhood — at the forefront of our relationships 

with no lover or family to take care of. In this case, friendship, or typically the end of one, 

is usually used as a tool to drive a coming-of-age story. After one becomes an adult there is 

little need for friendship anymore as one moves onto more important activities. The 

friendship itself never takes focus, only the gaps it leaves behind, creating cold, empty 

adults without warmth or openness in their hearts. 

 

    In Klara and the Sun, this trope is ever-present. Except instead of Leslie’s death helping 

Jess grow up in Bridge to Terabithia, our “dying friend” of an instrument meant to shove 

our protagonist out of amature adolescence and into adulthood is actually the protagonist 

herself, with the deuteragonist Josie being the one receiving her sacrifice — literally, in 

fact, as the dying Josie is only able to make it to adulthood through the help of the robot 

Klara. In addition, through her attempt to save Josie from her sickness, Klara sacrifices 

her own functionality in order to destroy the Cooting’s machine. Ultimately, as expected, 

after Klara saves Josie’s life and her family’s relationships, she is thrown away as Josie 

and her family are all off to move on and lead better lives. So much for the power of 

friendship.

 

 

    Klara’s needless ending leads to two things: firstly, Klara is treated as disposable due to 

her nature as a robot. The dying-friend-who-helps-the-protagonist-grow-up trope, as 

previously mentioned, has been around in literature for a very long time. It is expected for 

children to mature after losing their childhood friendships. Why not commercialize this 

milestone by providing “Artificial Friend” robots for children who will attend to and help 

with their every issue and can be thrown away after your child’s maturation? Being robots, 

the ethical issues are now obsolete as well. Every child can have their own character arc. 

This treatment of robots in Klara’s world is so normalized that even when Josie is leaving 

Klara behind to the junkyard, she doesn’t seem to feel a shred of sadness, instead focusing 

only on her own future in college.

 

The second thing is that friendship in general is not valued highly by society. Take 

Rick and Josie’s relationship, for example. At first, it seems that Rick and Josie are 

mimicking the dead-friend trope themselves. Rick is a young boy who’s outcasted by 

society and has family troubles that keep him from maturity. Josie is his life-long best 

friend who is bed-ridden and terminally ill. Without further context into the story, it would 

seem that Josie’s death might confront Rick with reality and inspire him to take action over 

his life and fix his problems.

 

    Rick and Josie’s friendship is portrayed as so strong that Klara calls upon it in her final 

prayer to the sun as evidence of why he must heal Josie and allow her to live. Nevertheless, 

after all is said and done, Josie and Rick part their ways and barely see each other again. 

Possibly one of the strongest relationships in the novel was reduced in the end to something 

shallow, and this dissolution of connection is portrayed as something natural, as after Rick 

and Josie grow up, they have no need for their friendship anymore. They have used the end 

of their friendship to move on to better opportunities.

 

 

    Through reading novels such as Klara and the Sun, one might begin believing that 

friendship is fleeting, like a mystifying firework that lasts only a second. However, McClay 

uses Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen” to introduce the idea of an “eternal 

summer” — friendship which doesn’t end from adulthood, but instead prospers through it, 

as they “grow up by being loyal, brave, and generous,” keeping the innocent and thoughtful 

childlike properties that lead them to having such wonderful memories. This portrayal of 

eternal friendship reminds us that life isn’t as sensibly laid out as it is in classic literature. 

As humans, we don’t need the entire plot laid out for us in order to realize what things we 

should treasure. Friendship can be long or short. It can have a myriad of effects on us no 

matter the intricacies of its presence. And sometimes, it creates summer-lessons that turn 

into life-long ones. Friendship’s importance lies in the intense moments it creates for us, 

not in the sterile gaps it leaves behind. Whether or not our own friendship is eternal, it’s 

clear that it’s more than just a tool, but a defining part of our lives.