Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Irony 6 key examples

Rick, who remembers Earth before World War Terminus, is "impressed" and startled by the opulence of the scavengers' office. In the world he remembers (more or less the world the reader knows), it is corporate lawyers and not trash collectors who work at "expensive genuine wood desks" atop lush, "deep-pile carpets." Trash collection, by contrast, is smelly, physically demanding, and at times dangerous. Even when sanitation workers are compensated well and granted workplace safety protections, their jobs are not associated with luxury.
Far from begrudging the scavengers their fancy office, Rick admits that it makes perfect sense. Garbage collection once functioned in the background of society to keep waste out of sight. The death and destruction of World War Terminus brought all the waste to the foreground, where no one can ignore it. Even more of a threat to society than the "radioactive dust" blanketing everything is the thick layer of "kipple" consisting of the once-precious belongings of people who are now dead or departed to Mars. There could never be a large enough landfill to hold all these objects. As John Isidore warns Pris Stratton, a whole building full of vacant apartments can be practically uninhabitable if the items of previous tenants aren't disposed of to make room for new life. Kipple thus creates a housing crisis, even in a near-empty world. "Scavenging" has become a lucrative and high-value industry because there is so much junk waiting to be taken away and repurposed before it crowds humans out of their homes.

Dick models the idea of kipple on the idea of entropy, the theory that everything in the universe tends toward chaos. Kipple, like everything else, is constantly trying to spiral out of control. And yet, kipple is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon like entropy. Rather, it is  a human-made problem that can be managed by the collective efforts of humans. One way to read Dick's kipple motif is as an environmentalist warning against over-consumption. Even in the absence of nuclear warfare, the buildup of kipple raises the question of when Earth will run out of space for the garbage humans throw out. By inviting readers to imagine a worst-case-scenario, Dick challenges them to consume less before the tide of kipple begins to rise over their heads. 

In this part of The Magic Flute, the hopeless romantic Papageno plays magic bells to enchant his captors into releasing him and the princess Pamina. Rick, as usual, is moved to tears by the idea that he, too, might play magic bells to banish his enemies. He feels both inspired and bitter to know that no such instrument exists. Even the genius creator of this opera, he reflects, died young and poor. If Mozart could not transcend his mortality or poverty, Rick can't imagine that he will ever feel as free as Papageno and Pamina.

By quoting the libretto (lyrics) in their original German, Dick invites the reader to look up a translation. Rick provides a passable gloss of the quoted passage, but he pays no attention to the lines that come immediately after it in the libretto. Pamina and Papageno go on to sing about "friendship's harmony" as the only source of happiness on earth. Rick is so caught up in the angst of his and Mozart's mortality that he ironically fails to hear or understand what his beloved opera is trying to teach him: he cannot make hardship magically disappear, but he can make his life easier and happier through friendship.

In a way, Rick's journey over the course of the novel is a journey to understand the central point of his favorite opera. The Magic Flute as a whole is about strangers who choose to learn about and from each other's differences instead of treating each other as enemies. This move from suspicion to curiosity is perhaps what would serve humanity best in their relationship with androids. For instance, while it is true that Rachael manipulates Rick and kills his sheep, her hostility is reactive. He is the one who first insists on ferreting out her differences and treating her as a subhuman threat. Pris, too, only becomes a threat to John Isidore because she is being hunted down. Treating androids with respect may in fact allow for everyone to stop hurting each other.

Luba Luft, an android who loves human art, embodies the curiosity that helps the characters in the opera move peaceably between their respective worlds. Rick's intense focus on the question of whether or not she is human prevents him from asking the more relevant question of whether or not it matters. At the end of the novel, Rick gets one last chance to ask this question when he finds a wild toad that ought to be extinct. Rick has been focused on money all day, but the rare animal means more to him than a paycheck; it makes him wonder at the persistence of life and connection on a planet that is supposed to be dead. When the toad turns out to be electric, Rick decides to keep it anyway. "Real" or not, the toad nonetheless offers him the chance to learn about and care for a strange creature.

Embedded in Garland's comeback is an assertion of exactly the opposite: "you humans" are in fact at least as lacking empathy as androids. If Rick truly had more empathy than Garland and Phil, surely he would struggle with the ethics of killing them. Instead, Garland points out, Rick is upholding a double standard. Rick believes that Garland's willingness to laugh at a fellow android is evidence of Garland's inhumanity. By this logic, Rick's humanity, too, should be subject to scrutiny; when he treats androids without empathy, his humanity ought to be considered diminished. On the contrary, Rick uses his belief in both androids' inhumanity as justification for murdering them. He in fact plans to murder them in order to reinforce his status as a human. Ultimately, these murders promise to make him a richer and more distinguished member of the cruel human society that is systematically executing androids.

Bounty hunters like Rick rationalize their violence by claiming that androids lack empathy and therefore constitute a danger to humanity. What is to stop androids on Earth from killing people if they have no inherent sense of empathy? Rick always administers empathy tests to targets before he kills them in order to make sure that he is neutralizing a threat and not taking the life of a human who deserves compassion. Garland's verbal irony draws attention to the flaw in Rick's perfect system for avoiding injustice. Human empathy can hardly be said to be inherent if it is applied so unevenly. The tests are written by humans to measure only certain kinds of empathy, and humans are not regularly subjected to the tests to determine whether they are adequately empathetic toward androids. If everyone were held to the same standards, Garland suggests, Rick might receive a lower grade than many of the androids he has already killed.

As far as Phil knows, he is a human bounty hunter working with Garland and other human police officers at the Mission Street Hall of Justice. The lab results confirming Polokov's android status challenge everything he knows to be true. Polokov appears just before Garland himself on Rick's list of android targets; if Polokov really is an android, Rick's list is at least partially correct. Phil, who has always believed that android tests ought to be administered more broadly, calmly insists that they all find out what they don't know about one another.

Once Phil goes to fetch the test, Rick and Garland have a conversation in which Garland reveals that androids have infiltrated human society to a much greater extent than Rick previously knew. The entire Mission Street Hall of Justice, Garland claims, is a shadow police force made up of androids passing for human. Rick is especially surprised and distressed to learn that not all of them know they are androids. He already knows that Rachael Rosen was supposedly raised with the belief that she was human, but it is shocking to him that Phil Resch can have an entire career as a bounty hunter without knowing that he himself is one of the androids he is devoted to ferreting out. Shouldn't he notice the signs? Garland points out that Phil's success as a bounty hunter depends on his mistaken belief in his own humanity. A self-aware android could never be motivated to hold this job. Suspense builds as the seconds tick by. Any moment now, Phil will find out that he himself is a threat, and his reality will collapse in on itself.

Rick's discomfort with the idea that Phil is an unsuspecting android is due to more than his empathy for a fellow bounty hunter. Rick's language suggests that he is beginning to wonder whether he could be an android himself. "What will tests on the three of us show?" he asks Garland, including himself in the mix. Rick believes that he is one of the best at distinguishing between humans and androids, but his experience at the Mission Street Hall of Justice has upended his sense of reality. He is somewhat comforted to learn that he was right about Polokov, and that his call to Iran would not go through to her because the androids rerouted it.

Still, if Phil is a good bounty hunter because he fundamentally misunderstands himself, Rick's skill at his job cannot be said to prove his humanity. All it proves is that he believes he is human. From this point on, as Rick questions himself, his skill as a bounty hunter begins to falter. Even when Phil turns out to be human after all, Rick is haunted by the idea that less may separate him from androids than he ever thought.

Unlike Rick and Iran, who seem highly dependent on the mood organ to feel much of anything, John remains attuned to the real, simple pleasures that are available to him. The mere smell of peaches is a luxury to him. He hopes to enjoy sharing the peaches with his new neighbor, Pris, but the pleasure they bring him now means that they will not be a waste even if she refuses his company. John's ability to appreciate the simple sensory joys that are available to him is perhaps due to the fact that his intellectual disability gives him little chance of upward mobility. Even though he is more competent than he gives himself credit for, radiation poisoning has made him quite literally a second class citizen. And yet, the vivid imagery here suggests that his life might be more satisfying than the eternally unfulfilled Rick and Iran's.

At first, Pris tells John that the food would be "wasted" on her, presumably because she is an android incapable of taking real, visceral pleasure in food. However, she soon changes her mind. Dick uses even more vivid imagery to describe what happens to Pris when she eats a peach slice:

“I’ll try a slice of peach,” she said, and gingerly picked out a slippery pink-orange furry slice with her long fingers. And then, as she ate the slice of peach, she began to cry. Cold tears descended her cheeks, splashed on the bosom of her dress.

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Pris is not supposed to be able to feel the way a human can, and yet the reader feels through her "long fingers" the "slippery" flesh of the peach slice and its "furry" edge. They see the "pink-orange" slices through her eyes as she picks out just the right one. The taste moves her to tears, and Dick allows the reader to imagine how the "cold" tears feel as they run down her face and onto her dress. This is not the reaction the reader would expect of an android, nor is it the reaction Pris seemed a moment ago to expect of herself.

It is quite possible that Pris is acting. The passage is written in the third person from John's perspective, so it is a more faithful representation of what John thinks he sees than anything else. Pris knows John expects her to enjoy the peach because that is what a human would do.  Even if Pris is putting on a show, however, the moment remains at least partially genuine. Sharing the peach gives John a sense of long-needed connection. He enjoys seeing Pris's reaction—real or artificial—to the peach he has offered her. This passage thus probes the relationship between pleasure and performance, a relationship that becomes especially fraught after Rick has sex with Rachael.

Oscar is a frequent guest on Buster Friendly's radio show. He speaks in what appears to be an exaggerated Southern drawl. Rick can't bear to listen to Oscar's voice in particular. "The voice of intelligent man," he scoffs, meaning the opposite. He thinks Oscar's dialect sounds unintelligent and uneducated.

Rick's disgust with Oscar seems to be heightened because of what has just happened with Rachael. As an android created by humans, she should not be more intelligent than humans. And yet, she has just explained that she has outsmarted Rick. She manipulated him into having sex with her so that he would be unable to bring himself to kill her. Disgusted by Rachael's cold smugness and embarrassed that he fell for her scheme, he tries to save face for humanity by turning off the radio and asserting that he knows Oscar sounds unintelligent.

Rachel immediately turns the radio back on. Rick does not realize at the time that Rachel wants to listen to the radio show because Buster Friendly is going to unmask Wilbur Mercer as a sham. Even so, he correctly clocks her glee at staying one step ahead of her human rivals. He watches her bitterly as she listens to the radio and revels in her sense of superiority.