In the novel

In the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, empathy is one of the main themes. This allows humanity left on Earth after World War Terminus to survive and function before the radioactive dust eventually kills them. At first, Rick Deckard finds it hard to identify himself with empathy. His job as a bounty hunter, killing androids that pose as humans, requires that he has no empathy for his targets. After all, they are machines with no soul. His pet electric sheep makes it even harder for him to develop empathy because there is no real relationship between them. An electric pet does not possess the emotions and character that a real animal can demonstrate to its owner. If the owner cannot realize this, it gets harder for them to realize they are falling into a simulated world. Feeding and caring for an electric pet becomes more of a duty rather than satisfaction of maintaining a caring relationship with an animal. The electric animals represent a temporary void filled by materialistic objects in our world. The purchase of things like an iPhone can be rewarding temporarily, but that feeling can quickly disappear when a newer version comes out. The proud feeling of earning something you worked hard for becomes absent and those morals are not passed down to the younger generation. Rick had the illusion that owning a real animal would give him a respectable social status. This can be found true when we see a Mercedes-Benz; we identify the owner as a person who is successful in life without even truly knowing who is behind that wheel. The real world sometimes tends to judge before any sort of interaction. If a human cannot directly relate to another person through experience, it is harder to have empathy for that person. The androids in this novel do not possess any empathy and are only programmed to be concerned about its own survival. This is how Rick determines the difference between an android and a human. Unlike the androids and Rick Deckard, John Isidore, considered a “chickenhead”, seems to be full of empathy. He finds out he has a new neighbor, Pris Stratton (an android), in his abandoned building. He tries to be understanding and respectable to her and her situation. When Rick comes to his building to kill Pris and her two android friends, Isidore does not tell him where they are. He instead defends the androids and tells Rick that he will be out of Mercerism if he kills them. Another time when Isidore displays empathy is after he fails to revive a dying electric cat that he is transporting to the veterinarian hospital. The manner in which he delivers the bad news show just how empathetic he is. He surprises his superiors by being sensitive to the subject. Rather than breaking the devastating news to her husband, the wife of the owner of the dead electric pet accepts Isidore’s offer of a new, identical cat.

Rick Deckard’s view on what is real or not starts to change when he is booked while trying to “retire” Luba Luft, an android that disguises herself as an opera singer celebrity. When his attempt fails, Officer Garland books Rick at a station he has never seen nor heard of. At this point of the novel, Rick starts to question what is actually real. At the station, Officer Garland, an android posing as a cop, starts questioning him about his hit list of androids and asks him if he knows the other bounty hunters of Northern California. He calls in a bounty hunter named Phil Resch, but Resch leaves momentarily to retrieve some documents. As events and information start to unfold in the interrogation room, Rick finds out that Garland and potentially Resch are androids. When Resch comes back, he soon realizes what Garland has told Rick. Resch, reacting quickly, kills Garland before he can kill them. This lack of empathy when killing Garland makes Rick question if Resch really was an android. Phil Resch explains that his empathy for living things has disappeared and he now purely enjoys killing. Rick starts to question if humanity is possible without empathy and if androids can obtain it.

We live in an increasingly virtual world. Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter consists of millions of users worldwide. While some people initially may have started networking on these sites as a fun hobby, many people have become somewhat addicted and dependent on them. A recent report published online by Retrevo Gadgetology entitled, Is Social Media a New Addiction? states , “…when almost half of social media users say they check Facebook or Twitter sometime during the night or when they first wake up, you have to wonder if these people aren’t suffering from some sort of addiction to social media..” For a lot of people, this means that their public image is the last thing they think about before they go to bed and is the first thought they wake up to in the morning. This emphasis on self-image is similar to Rick’s desire for buying a real animal. In order to achieve a certain social status, people will go to extreme lengths to obtain it, just like how Rick is willing to kill for what he wants. These social site users feel as if they have accomplished something when people “like” their pictures or post comments on their site’s wall. This decreases the value and meaning of what accomplishments really are. They want to be seen and heard so they portray themselves as what they aspire to be, and not who they really are. They might be unintentionally creating a fake identity that they now feel like they have to live up to, which further separates them from their real identity. The longer someone engages in a virtual world, the harder it is to see what is real. Buster Friendly’s show is an example of a virtual world blinding the public’s perspective. His TV and radio show is the only channel that are available to people 24 hours a day. They are left with no choice but to watch his show. His stories can be fabricated, but it is the only public voice that people hear. Ultimately, people rely on him for sources of information which they don’t even question, just like how most of us blindly accept anything on the news to be true.

As cell phones become more advanced, they are capable of more functions. Text messages are a way to communicate and an alternate to talking with someone on the phone; which is another alternate to talking face-to-face with someone. This, while convenient, can cause a breakdown in communication skills. It can decrease a person’s literacy when they are spelling with abbreviations (or even misspelling a word on purpose) and using improper grammar. People are always trying to find an easier way, even when the task at hand is so simple. Feelings or connotations are hard to express, and even harder to understand when there are no personable conversations.

Rick Deckard’s view of Roy Baty was that he would be the hardest Nexus-6 android type to “retire”. Androids were created to serve humans living on Mars. Roy Baty, a pharmacist, orchestrated the killings of humans and planned the escape to Earth. Rick thought if Roy Baty, an android, can have a dream to escape to Earth with his wife, are they that different than humans? If they did not want to be subjected to slavery, does that not mean androids possess the ability to process an original thought? This point was further demonstrated when Rick killed Roy’s wife, Irmgard Baty. As Roy Baty approached his murdered wife, he let out death cries like a human would have which meant that androids were capable of emotion. The only difference then between a human and android might only be their physical attributes. Rick contemplated this as he set off for home after finishing his job of killing the remaining androids.

The empathy box used in this novel was a source to share sufferings and feelings with other Mercer believers. The point of Mercerism is to share sufferings (or joys) and that way, people can live with empathy. It is to show believers that through togetherness, the human society can progress because when you are surrounded with empathetic people, they give you support. Another point of Mercerism is to steer one away from selfishness caused by greed. There is no time to be selfish if you are constantly trying to help and support others. At the end of the novel when Rick finds an extinct toad during his experience as Mercer on top of a hill, his immediate thoughts were to make a fortune by selling an extinct species. Later when he arrives at home, his wife Iran reveals to him that it’s a mechanical toad. Instead of being despaired, the transformation he went through earlier after killing the androids had changed him. He did not feel any sadness when finding out the toad was not real because he had accepted Mercerism and its beliefs that go along with it. He learned how to feel and show empathy for even mechanical objects. Some religious facts might not be entirely truthful, but the idea of religion is not necessarily to support a God; it is to support the ideas pushed forward by the religion. Wilbur Mercer might have been just part of the characters’ imagination or even fabricated, but the ideas set forth should be accepted as what is real.

Iran Deckard shows just how much empathy a human being can have when Rick finds out his toad is not real. When he goes to sleep from his final, grueling day of andy killing, Iran calls to have a replacement toad sent to them. It is her empathetic decision to care for the replacement toad and to take care of Rick. As the chaotic world may be getting further away from the truth, these acts of kindness can be factors in restoring our society.