Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Similes 3 key examples

This advertisement is shocking, to the reader if not to Isidore. By comparing life with a personal android servant to "the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states," it paints a disturbing picture of the social hierarchy that humans have used androids to reproduce. "Halcyon" means idyllic, prosperous, and lost to history; the advertisement thus appeals to nostalgia for a time and place when rich White landowners enjoyed luxury that is all-but unimaginable to people stuck living in nuclear winter. Those who emigrate, the advertisement promises, will receive "absolutely free" a rich and fantastically comfortable life that constitutes an escape from all their problems.

The advertisement fails to remind anyone that the luxury that pre-Civil War White landowners enjoyed did not come "absolutely free." It was facilitated through the brutal exploitation of enslaved Black people and created a huge wealth gap between the richest White Southerners and everyone else. Isidore cannot emigrate because he has been affected by nuclear radiation. If the androids are like enslaved Black people, John is like the poor White people who never stood a chance of getting rich in the slave economy. He is more privileged than an android, but he is near the bottom of the social ladder. Rick Deckard, meanwhile, is like a professional slavecatcher, violently clinging to a middle rung. Perhaps he will never have an android servant of his own, but he can at least make enough money for a real sheep by working for the system that is enriching others to a much greater degree.

The difficulty throughout the book of distinguishing clearly between humans and androids resonates with old arguments for and against slavery, which quibbled over whether or not Black people were fully human. The advertisement implies that the "humanoid robots" are human enough to recreate the feeling enslavers must have enjoyed when their "unique needs" were met by people they enslaved. At the same time, the advertisement implies that "humanoid robots" are inhuman enough that ethics are irrelevant. One way of interpreting Dick's allegory is as a warning that there may come a time when robots become humanoid enough to pose major ethical questions.

However, the broader social hierarchy the allegory highlights gestures toward a larger and more present concern. Dick, writing in the Cold War and under real threat of nuclear winter, worries about the cost to everyone when humans pursue wealth and scientific advancement without regard to the sanctity of life. Exploiting androids—or anyone—requires that humans dial down their innate urge to empathize. This erosion of empathy allows for the commission of terrible atrocities. The line "It continued on and on" refers to the TV advertisement, but it may as well also refer to the endless cycle of violence and destruction humans can't seem to end in their pursuit of wealth and "advancement."

The painting Phil and Rick are stopped in front of is The Scream, an iconic Munch painting. By making the central figure shapeless, genderless, and more "creature" than human, Munch makes a point about the universal loneliness of pain. Everyone's suffering feels unique and isolating, and yet this very condition of existence is shared by all.

Phil Resch, determined to prove to himself that he is a human and not an android, doesn't seem to get much out of the painting. He doesn't want to see himself in this strange "creature." Rick, on the other hand, seems more moved. Dick's close third-person narration suggests that the passage's thoughtful and observant description of the painting is drawn from Rick's mind. It is Rick who reflects on the creature's "outcry" and how it "cuts [the creature] off" from the rest of the world. He understands something of the creature's pain.

The picture sticks in Rick's mind, surfacing again at the moment when he kills Luba Luft:

She began to scream; she lay crouched against the wall of the elevator, screaming. Like the picture, Rick thought to himself, and, with his own laser tube, killed her. Luba Luft’s body fell forward, facedown, in a heap. It did not even tremble.

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By comparing a screaming Luba to the creature, Rick raises the question of whether he is killing her because or in spite of her "outcry." Does her unseemly behavior prove that she is monstrous and must be killed, or is Rick choosing to ignore the evidence that she is just like him, scared of a hostile world? Luba's resemblance to the painting forces Rick to think about the execution not only as an item on his to-do list, but also as a moment loaded with pain and suffering from both sides. For a moment just before her death, it ceases to matter who is human and who is not. If Luba is the creature from the painting in which Rick already recognized himself, then both of them stand screaming on the bridge. It is painful for Rick to recognize himself in Luba via the creature from the painting. It means that all along, he has been an agent of the same suffering he has spent his life trying to escape. Rick kills Luba not necessarily because she is an android, but rather in order to make her an android again instead of a fellow screaming creature.

Irmgard Baty thinks John is breaking the cup, the wall, the chair, and more in a fit of anger and grief over realizing that Wilbur Mercer, his messiah, is nothing more than a Hollywood actor performing on a soundstage. John, however, insists that the items are breaking of their own accord. He is merely watching as the cup is covered in webs "like the shadows of a vine" and as a piece of it breaks off. In between the glazed inner and outer surfaces of the cup is jagged, exposed ceramic.

By comparing the cracks in the cup to "shadows of a vine," Dick suggests that the vines themselves are not quite visible yet. They are showing through the surface from the inside of the cup, bursting free. The "rough, unglazed interior" of the ceramic is the source of the vines, and the source of the destruction: this real thing beneath the smooth veneer of the glaze is destroying the cup from the inside out, forcing itself into the light.

The breaking cup is a metaphor for what is happening to John's understanding of reality. He is realizing that Mercerism, the solid belief system that has always "held water" for him, is in fact a surface that has been painted onto something that is far messier. In a literal sense, the broken cup can no longer hold water because it is cracked, and the unglazed ceramic is permeable to liquid. And yet this rough interior, John realizes, was there all along. It can simply no longer be ignored. This is an important turn in the novel because it demonstrates the immense power of belief. No matter what is "really" true, belief systems like Mercerism and human supremacy over androids have given shape to people's lives. When characters like John or Rick begin questioning their belief systems, the glaze on reality weakens. The truth soon comes bursting through, far rougher, sharper, and more fragile than any belief system that can be painted onto it. In fact, once the questioning begins, it may not be possible to collect all the pieces together again into the shape of a smooth cup. All they are left with is chaos and broken bits to sift through.