We couldn’t go on with the electric sheep any longer, it sapped my morale” (Dick 168). Buying a real animal becomes obsession to Rick: “My job requires it, he thought, scraping bottom. However, he dreams of having a real sheep instead of his electric one for showing his empathy and improving his social status. Rick Recard, one of the main characters works as a bounty hunter and killing androids who came to earth from Mars is his daily job. Using the empathy boxes and buying real animals for the purpose of generating feelings, the characters lose their humanness. Thus, overemphasizing the importance of feeling empathy, the book characters look for the empathy experience for its own sake. However, this approach shows the lack of true feelings in the human race and reflects the author’s criticism of the moral decay in modern community. The feeling of empathy is put into the basis of their religion Mercerism and the so-called Voigt-Kampff test used for distinguishing between humans and androids. Thus, the fact that humans living after the World War Terminus need to buy real animals for demonstrating their ability to feel empathy proves that they themselves hesitate in it. The depiction of empathy as the feeling characteristic of humans only and thus distinguishing them from other living beings can be regarded as the major underpinning of the whole plot of the book under consideration.ĭisregarding the peculiarities of the science fiction genre chosen by the author, the motive of feeling and not feeling empathy towards other creatures conveys an important philosophical message.
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