Philip K. Dick by Kucukalic Lejla;

Author:Kucukalic, Lejla;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language & Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

TOWARD CONCLUSION

The themes in Do Androids develop on at least three narrative levels; first, as the story of its characters, Deckard, his peculiar double, the mentally impaired J.R. Isidore, Iran, and the androids; second is the structural level, representing the world as a set of governing principles, most notably as entropy opposed to empathy; third is the level of the creative fabric of language and narrative in which new concepts are brought to life and “every-thing that anyone has ever thought” becomes the truth. As in Dick’s other novels, the characters in Do Androids experience reality as a composite of uncanny forces beyond their control and technologically produced dreams that allow them to escape temporarily. The surface phenomena of Dick’s world point to deeper philosophical problems; androids pose questions about human identity, and a total environmental disaster indicates the gen-eral cosmic entropy.

Dick’s method in the novel brings together the historical and the imaginative, the philosophical and the particular; some elements are entirely invented, while others refer clearly to the current social and past historical phenomena.16 The conversation, for example, between Rick Deckard and his neighbor Douglas Barbour, which closes Chapter One, reveals the typical mindset of middle-class Americans, a “man-to-man” conversation, in which Deckard and Barbour are negotiating the sale and attainment of coveted possessions. “Ever thought of selling your horse?” Deckard proffers to Barbour (9). The familiar tone and theme—coveting objects and establishing social and moral values around them—are juxtaposed with experientially new situation—the existence of perfectly rendered electric animals—to create the specific narrative dimension of the novel.

Androids themselves are not only a scientifically sound product based on the theories of cybernetics, but an image of mechanized human nature, an idea that has been growing since the beginning of the twentieth century. Art movements such as Dadaism, futurism, and surrealism all express this view of the human being. Dick builds upon this tradition by introducing the android not as an artificially created and sophisticated machine, but applying the term to human beings who are cold and unkind toward others. “By android,” explained Dick, “I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being” (Shifting Realities 211). Instead, androids are human beings who do not care what happens to their fellow human beings, selfish and detached, without empathic feeling. “These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior” (211).

Although the division between unfeeling and feeling characters is not emphasized in Do Androids, it is a theme present throughout the novel. In this sense, the designation of someone like J.R Isidore as a human being, comes from his care for all creatures around him. When Rick Deckard per-secutes and starts interrogating android Luba Luft he confidently asserts “an android does not care what happens to another android,” to which Luba Luft about to be “retired” by Deckard, responds: “then, you must be an android” (101), a challenge that is

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