Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep Character Analysis

In the Novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco years after World War Terminus. There are two main characters, Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter that captures and “retires” illegally immigrated androids that have managed to escape Mars. J.R. Isadore is known as a “chicken head”; meaning that he was not smart enough to emigrate to the Mars colony and is left on Earth to be eventually killed by its hazardous environment, and works as an electronic animal veterinarian. Throughout the novel J.R. Isadore and Rick Deckard struggle to deal with their emotions and begin to question what makes them human. This leads to empathy being used to help distinguish between humans and android 's. The definition of empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Webster Dictionary). For humans it is very easy to understand empathy because we can feel emotions however, androids don’t have emotions but rather have an understanding of what an emotion is. Empathy is seen as the key factor that makes us different than the androids that are on earth, however Rick Deckard and J.R. Isadore realize is empathy towards androids realistic and possible or is it a weakness because

In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, empathy is an important motive throughout the novel. Technology has advanced so far to the point that androids are able to replicate human emotions so well that humans themselves begin to question whether the emotions they feel are real. Throughout the novel you see the struggle of man vs. machine and what their place is in society, and how their placement in society is defined by their empathy. In society humans have a higher social status than androids because they understand empathy. Personally, I believe that androids are not capable of feeling empathy towards others however, I feel humans using technology to feel empathy makes us more like