Retiring

Retiring is the official euphemism for the destruction of escaped humanoid robots, a practice that constitutes the primary occupation of bounty hunters like Rick Deckard and the central moral dilemma of the novel. The term masks the act of killing with a sanitized, bureaucratic label, yet the novel relentlessly exposes the violence and ethical ambiguity behind it. Deckard's work is not merely a job; it is the mechanism by which the boundary between human and android is violently enforced, and his growing unease with this role drives the narrative's deepest conflicts.

Economic and Professional Structure

The bounty system provides the primary incentive for bounty hunters. Deckard receives a thousand dollars per android retired, over and above his salary as a city employee. This bounty money is the only means by which he can afford a real animal, a goal that dominates his personal life. After retiring three andys in one day, he uses the three thousand dollars as a down payment on a black Nubian goat, a living creature that represents status, hope, and a connection to a pre-war world. The system is designed to create a relentless drive: the more andys he kills, the closer he gets to the animal he craves. The profession is also hierarchical; Deckard acts as senior bounty hunter only after Dave Holden, the department's chief, is hospitalized by an android. The list of eight escaped Nexus-6 andys is passed from Holden to Deckard, and each retirement is a step toward completing the assignment and collecting the full reward.

The Voigt-Kampff Test as a Prerequisite

Before an android can be legally retired, it must be identified. The Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test is the primary tool for this, measuring autonomic responses to morally shocking stimuli to detect the absence of empathy that defines androids. Deckard's entire mission hinges on the test's reliability. When the Rosen Association attempts to discredit the test by having him misidentify the android Rachael Rosen as human, his ability to continue his work is threatened. He must prove the test works on a Nexus-6 unit before he can proceed with the bounty. The test is thus not merely a diagnostic tool but a legal and professional prerequisite; without it, there is no way to identify an android, and therefore no way to collect the bounty. The novel's plot is structured around Deckard's attempts to administer the test to each target, and his failures or successes in doing so determine the course of each encounter.

The Act of Retiring and Its Moral Weight

The act of retiring is depicted as a violent, often desperate, confrontation. Deckard uses a laser tube or a .38 magnum pistol, and the androids fight back with equal ferocity. Max Polokov nearly kills Deckard by impersonating a Soviet police officer; Luba Luft calls a police officer who is herself an android, leading to Deckard's arrest. The violence is not clean or abstract; it is messy, personal, and terrifying. Deckard's own emotional state deteriorates with each killing. After retiring Luba Luft, he declares, "I'm getting out of this business." The act of retiring an android, especially one who sings beautifully or looks like a woman he has been intimate with, forces him to confront the question of whether androids have souls. The novel's most profound crisis occurs when Deckard, after killing the last three andys, feels an overwhelming sense of emptiness and alienation, leading him to drive into the desert and experience a solitary, hallucinatory ascent of Mercer's hill.

The Killers and the Theology of Retiring

Deckard rationalizes his work through the theology of Mercerism. The religion's central tenet, "You shall kill only the killers," allows him to view escaped androids as the embodiment of an absolute evil, "The Killers." An android, he believes, is a solitary predator with no capacity for empathy, a creature that has killed its master and now threatens human society. This framework provides a moral justification for his profession. However, this justification unravels when he meets Phil Resch, a bounty hunter who clearly enjoys killing. Resch's lack of empathy toward androids mirrors the very trait that defines them, forcing Deckard to recognize that his own feelings of empathy for androids like Luba Luft and Rachael Rosen are not a weakness but a sign of his humanity. The novel ultimately suggests that the act of retiring is not a righteous purge but a tragic, necessary evil, a violation of one's own identity that is, as Mercer tells Deckard, "the basic condition of life."

The Final Retirement and Its Aftermath

Deckard's final act of retiring is the killing of the last three androids: Pris Stratton, Irmgard Baty, and Roy Baty. He kills Pris on the stairs, recognizing her as a duplicate of Rachael Rosen, and then dispatches the Batys in their apartment. The scene is grim and devoid of triumph. Afterward, he sits alone among the bodies, feeling nothing but a crushing weight. He tells the special John Isidore, "Androids are stupid," but the remark is hollow. The completion of his assignment brings no satisfaction, only a profound sense of loss and a need to escape. He drives north into the uninhabited desert, where he experiences a solitary fusion with Mercer, climbing a hill and being struck by real rocks. This experience, which he undergoes alone and without the empathy box, marks the end of his career as a bounty hunter. He returns home, exhausted and changed, and the novel ends with him sleeping, having finally achieved a "long deserved peace."