ABSTRACT
Empathy is a major topic in Philip K. Dick's famous Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As this chapter argues, the novel deals with empathy while provoking and basically disorienting the reader's empathic reactions – an important factor for understanding the fictional characters and also the overall story. In order to demonstrate Dick's use of manifold strategies on a narrative, linguistic, and structural level, three central aspects for addressing the reader's empathic attitudes are analyzed: the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test for discriminating androids from human beings, the empathic capacities of the three different types of characters – humans, androids, and “specials” – and the animals, the worshipped counterpart of the androids. In all of these aspects, Dick puts the reader's affective reactions to the proof and sparks a thorough reflection on basic assumptions and beliefs with regard to possible objects of empathy, the reader's own usual empathic or unempathic behaviour, and – even more essentially – the meaning of humanness in general. The empathy test in the book is therefore not ultimately designed for the androids but for the reader.
