Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun may not look like Severance at first glance, but both stories circle the same unsettling question: what’s left of a person when they’re treated as a purpose-driven product?
A sick child’s loneliness in a sunlit house. Corporate employees in an office where “work” and “home” are split into separate lives. On the surface, Klara and the Sun and Severance couldn’t be more different—yet they end up gripping the same raw nerve.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 science-fiction novel is deceptively quiet. built around identity. personhood. and what remains of us when our lives are narrowed to a single purpose. Severance. meanwhile. has inspired workplace satires and psychological thrillers. but one of its closest thematic cousins isn’t another TV series at all. It’s Klara and the Sun.
Both stories approach the fear of utility from opposite directions. Severance confines office employees inside a corporate dystopia created by Lumon Industries. where employees’ memories are bifurcated between work and home. Dan Erickson’s series asks what happens when a single person is split into two selves—Lumon employees become “innies” and “outies. ” each living an incomplete life with no access to the other’s memories. In the show, memory becomes the foundation of identity: without it, even the same body can house two different people.
In Klara and the Sun. Kazuo Ishiguro poses a parallel question through Klara. an artificial companion bought to help combat the social isolation tied to being a sick child. She’s designed to observe people so closely that she can imitate them with uncanny precision. At one point. she’s even considered a possible continuation of Josie. should the girl die. pushing the novel’s central doubt: is perfect imitation the same as becoming someone?. The answer—like Severance’s—is no.
Memory, behavior, and personality matter in both works, but they aren’t enough on their own. Both reject the comforting idea that a person can be reduced to information. There’s always something left over that can’t be copied, programmed, or divided into neat categories.
What makes the connection sting most is utility. In Lumon Industries. employees exist to perform “mysterious and important” work while the company strips away everything that makes them whole. Their value comes from productivity, not individuality. They become interchangeable pieces in a machine whose purpose they’re never allowed to understand.
Klara has a different kind of existence. but it still resembles a familiar pattern: Artificial Friends are bought. used. and then disposed of once their assigned duties have been performed. Klara doesn’t rebel against that reality. She isn’t portrayed as someone desperate to revolt against humans or claim superiority. Her primary existence centers on a desire to assist Josie, even though that choice can cause long-term harm to herself. Most science fiction about artificial intelligence. the novel’s premise suggests. imagines machines desperate to become human—but Klara doesn’t crave freedom or power. She wants only to do the job she was created to do as well as possible.
Ironically, the human characters are the ones constantly trying to erase the line between person and machine.
Severance frames the philosophical question through memory. Every elevator ride creates a new version of the same person. forcing viewers to decide whether the innie and outie are equally real. Klara and the Sun reaches a similar conclusion through observation. but it’s drawn toward a different lesson: people aren’t defined solely by what they do. They’re shaped by relationships, by the memories, love, and connections that form a life. Those things can’t simply be transferred into another body, no matter how advanced the technology becomes.
That’s an idea that echoes in Severance, where innies constantly fight for recognition as complete individuals rather than disposable extensions of their outies. Both works land in the same place: personhood isn’t something institutions get to define.
Neither story offers robot uprisings or apocalyptic spectacle. They imagine futures that feel only a few steps removed from our own. In Severance, workers willingly surrender parts of themselves for professional success. In Klara and the Sun. artificial companions are presented as a solution to childhood loneliness while genetic enhancement reshapes social class behind the scenes. Neither world arrives through catastrophe. Both emerge through small compromises that gradually become the norm.
If Severance has captured your imagination with themes of identity. consciousness. and the difference between being alive and simply being a machine or an object. Klara and the Sun is one of the clearest next stops. It explores the same themes. but it does so with different weather: wide-open sky and private moments between two people instead of a corporate system that splits a life in half.
Long story short, Klara whispers where Severance screams.
Klara and the Sun Severance Kazuo Ishiguro identity personhood memory artificial companion Lumon Industries innies and outies