One’s Actions Can Distort One’s View

            

            Philip Dick’s futuristic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep emulates modern day society’s way of life.  The understanding of technological advances pushes the creative powers of mankind to a limit even superior to their own understanding.  The novel sets the tone by creating a setting of the aftermath of an enormous World War that infests the atmosphere with radiation and has catastrophic causes across the Earth.  This tragic event also leads to a society where most animals become extinct, making them a symbol of wealth and status.  Since animals are now “a rare commodity”, they represent material things such as “present day”, designer clothes, and expensive cars.  To own an animal after the nuclear fallout was to show one’s membership in the elite or rich class in society.  Just like in modern society, those who cannot afford the finer things in life improvise, the people of the new world also imitate items from the rich and famous by making “bootleg” animals, like modern day fake Gucci products, to give the fake representation of high class living. 

            Philip Dick’s novel also brings the reader into the psyche of those who are enslaved and those who are slave masters.  The elite have made advance in technology and can now create androids that are almost indistinguishable from humans.  This shows how the need to place one’s self above others can create circumstances that the creator may not be ready to handle.  This oppression and social isolation of the androids is reminiscent of the treatment of blacks during the time of slavery.  In thinking they were better, more intelligent, and moral, slave masters where convinced that they were exercising the epitome of human action, when in reality they were just as fake, savage and artificial as they viewed the androids in Dick’s novel.  However, even in the midst of prejudice, truth shines its way through and blinds one, forcing him or her to face their true selves, as with Rick Deckard the bounty hunter in the novel.