Dave Holden's list
Dave Holden's list is the operational document that drives the central plot of the novel, a set of onionskin carbons and typed notes that identifies eight escaped Nexus-6 androids in Northern California and assigns them to a bounty hunter for retirement. Created by the senior bounty hunter Dave Holden before he was incapacitated by the android Max Polokov, the list passes to Rick Deckard and becomes the instrument through which he confronts the moral and psychological crisis of his profession.
Origin and Contents
The list originates with Dave Holden, the department's chief bounty hunter, who had already retired two of the eight androids before Polokov lasered him during a Voigt-Kampff test. Inspector Harry Bryant retrieves the notes from Holden's desk and initially withholds them from Deckard, insisting that Deckard first travel to Seattle to validate the Voigt-Kampff scale against the new Nexus-6 brain unit. The list consists of blurred third- or fourth-carbon onionskin sheets, each bearing a description, current address, and place of business for a suspect. Bryant taps the bundle of notepaper and says, "Dave thinks so. That was him I was talking to. I have his notes; they were in his desk. He says all he knows is here." The list includes Max Polokov, a trash collector mimicking a special; Luba Luft, an opera singer attached to the San Francisco Opera Company; the android calling itself Inspector Garland, listed inaccurately as an insurance underwriter; and the three remaining members of the group: Roy Baty, Irmgard Baty, and Pris Stratton. Deckard later reads the typed carbon sheets on Roy Baty, which describe him as having "an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority" and note that he "proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android 'life.'" The list also records that Baty stole and experimented with mind-fusing drugs, hoping to promote in androids a group experience similar to Mercerism.
Transmission and Use
Bryant gives the list to Deckard only after Deckard has proven the Voigt-Kampff scale's effectiveness against a Nexus-6 android in Seattle. Deckard carries the crumpled carbons in his briefcase throughout the day, consulting them between assignments. After retiring Polokov, he studies the sheet on Luba Luft while waiting for the Soviet cop Sandor Kadalyi, and later reads the poop sheet on Roy Baty in a hotel room before Rachael Rosen arrives. The list functions as both a map and a burden: each entry names a being that Deckard must locate, test, and destroy, and the physical state of the papers — smudged, creased, carbon copies — mirrors the accumulating moral weight of the work. When Deckard is arrested by the android Officer Crams and brought to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, Inspector Garland examines the carbons and discovers that his own name appears on the list. "It's an unpleasant sensation," Garland says, "to find yourself a bounty hunter's assignment all of a sudden." The list thus becomes a mirror that reflects back on the hunter, revealing that the boundary between hunter and hunted is not as stable as Deckard had assumed.
Narrative and Thematic Significance
The list structures the novel's action as a relentless sequence of encounters, each one stripping away another layer of Deckard's professional certainty. It is the mechanism by which the plot forces him to confront the humanity of his targets: he feels empathy for Luba Luft, sleeps with Rachael Rosen (who is not on the list but is the same Nexus-6 subtype as Pris Stratton), and ultimately cannot bring himself to kill Rachael even after she murders his goat. The list also represents the bureaucratic machinery of the bounty system — a printed schedule of deaths that reduces living beings to items on a checklist. Deckard's final act of the day, retiring Roy Baty, completes the list, but the completion brings no satisfaction; instead it leaves him hollowed out, driving north into the desert until he experiences a solitary fusion with Mercer. The list, which began as a tool of professional competence, ends as the record of a moral transformation that makes the profession impossible to continue.
