Heather O Neill's The Dreamlife Of Toasters

Android 4F6, from Heather O’Neill’s futuristic world in the short story "The Dreamlife of Toasters” accidentally possessing the emotions “deemed unnecessary for their specific function in the world” (209) challenges the distinction between humans and their mechanical inferiors. Acting upon her unsolicited passion, the android is given the miracle of life, which causes her values to be compromised as her humanistic and artificial viewpoints create an internal conflict with respects to justifying the abandonment of her baby with the reasoning of the preservation of society. Ultimately, Heather O’Neill’s "The Dreamlife of Toasters” provokes a feeling of uneasiness as 4F6’s human-like consciousness recognizes the moral incorrectness of her programmed

Comparisons of her reaction towards a lost body part and the abandonment of her child are referenced. More notably, this contrast reflects her, prior versus post acquirement of emotions. Losing a literal part of herself came with much ease, sans emotion, which generates a more pronounced difference between 4F6’s incomprehensible emptiness evoked by the sacrifice of the piece procreated from her passion. 4F6 “… had a sensation of being empty.”(215) however seems unable to reason with her emotions, for “As much as she considered it, it did not make sense to her. Yet there it was.”(215) Guilt and emptiness can be seen as causations of each others in a vicious, relentless cycle. These two emotions may be inferred as 4F6’s punishment, which would imply she subconsciously recognizes the wrongness behind her actions. Arguable to 4F6’s prioritization of the preservation of her prototype, the author undertones the desertion of the child with moral incorrectness and inhumanity portrayed through 4F6’ guilt, which assists with the uneasiness projected throughout the

Emptiness caused by the abandonment is fortified, by the image of the tiny robot “who lay there, entwined with the toaster, and in this way, he tried to assure himself that, somehow he was loved.”(216) Knowing that the young android is paralleled to a baby and is being deprived of the maternal figure needed to provide care, reaffirms the classification of 4F6’s actions as abandonment. Alone, the image of a baby grasping onto an inanimate object, hoping for love, concludes the story, however entails unsettlement and discomfort to evolve beyond the written