Breaking Down Walls in Post-Pandemic Transnational Fables: Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man¹.

This article analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's *Klara and the Sun* and Mohsin Hamid's *The Last White Man* as post-pandemic transnational fables that indirectly engage with the COVID-19 pandemic and its social fallout. Both novels avoid specific temporal and geographic settings, using fabular storytelling to explore themes of loneliness, digital dependency, racial division, and social fragmentation intensified since 2016 by events such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Ishiguro's narrative, through the perspective of an artificial intelligence companion, examines barriers—both physical and metaphorical—related to technology, gene editing, and social isolation, while Hamid's absurdist fable addresses racial classification and the anxieties of whiteness amid a surreal epidemic of racial transformation. Together, these works highlight the pandemic's intersection with broader issues of race, class, gender, and environmental crisis, encouraging readers to reflect on and transcend the metaphorical and literal walls dividing societies in a rapidly changing world.