Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep Essay

The Reincarnation of the Eight-Legged Guide In a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, human bounty hunters and androids are firmly pitted against each other in a race for survival, and empathy, which only the humans allegedly possess, is the sole differentiating factor. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, through the evolution of the characters’ shifting perception of the spider, PKD uses the insect as a guide in order to reveal the destruction of traditional ideas rooted in speciesism and its gradual replacement with ideas that begin to hesitantly include a variety of species, mainly the androids. The value of empathy shifts as the parallel between androids and spiders destroy old stereotypes and prejudices, marking the resurrection of the spider along with these new, inclusionary beliefs. In the beginning of the novel, Rick compares androids to spiders, using them as an example to justify his killing of numerous androids, reasoning that the spider, “a solitary organism...would have no use for [empathy], in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive.” (31) Despite the fact that the spider is an animal (which are revered and commodified in this society), because it is a solitary creature in a society that places the highest value on community, Rick is contemptuous of its value. Therefore, Rick dismisses the …show more content…
With the figurative and/or literal resurrection of the spider and the falsity of Mercerism, widespread empathy, uninhibited by the constraints of the empathy box and the exclusively human version of empathy, is extended as PKD weaves Rick’s and Isidore’s differing perceptions of the spider together to stress the critical need of letting go of prejudice to embrace a posthuman