Despair

Despair pervades the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as both a scheduled mood and an existential condition, one that the novel's characters actively choose, medicate against, or fall into when confronted with the emptiness of their environment. It is not a passing sadness but a deliberate, self-perpetuating response to a planet where radioactive dust has driven most life to extinction, where human emigration has left cities hollow, and where the moral cost of hunting androids erodes the hunter's own humanity. The narrative treats despair as a symptom of the times — a feeling that can be dialed up on a Penfield mood organ, that seeps from empty apartments, and that even the empathy of Mercerism can only temporarily relieve.

The Scheduled Despair of Iran Deckard

Iran Deckard, Rick's wife, has programmed a six-hour self-accusatory depression into her mood organ's schedule for twice a month. She discovered the setting after an afternoon when she turned off the sound on Buster Friendly's television show and heard the building around her — the empty apartments — and felt nothing. Reading later that this "absence of appropriate affect" was considered a sign of mental illness, she experimented with her mood organ until she found a setting for despair. She defends this choice to Rick as a reasonable response to staying on Earth after everybody who is small has emigrated. Rick warns her that a mood like that is self-perpetuating, but Iran has programmed an automatic resetting for three hours later — a 481, awareness of the manifold possibilities open to her in the future. Despite this safety measure, Rick insists that even with an automatic cutoff it is dangerous to undergo any kind of depression. When Rick later calls home after retiring Polokov, he finds Iran still in the six-hour depression she had prophesied; she has redialed it as soon as he left. Her face appears sodden, her voice sinks into a dreary drone of despond, and she tells him she has no hope left of anything — of their marriage, of him possibly getting killed by andys. She cannot even hear him when he tries to tell her about the bounty money. Rick bitterly reflects that most androids he has known have more vitality and desire to live than his wife.

The World-Silence and Isidore's Despair

John Isidore experiences despair not as a dialed mood but as a physical presence that assails him from the objects around him. When he shuts off his television, the silence flashes from the woodwork and the walls, smiting him with an awful, total power as if generated by a vast mill. It rises from the floor, oozes from the broken appliances, and meshes with the empty descent of itself from the ceiling. The silence seems to supplant all things tangible, assailing not only his ears but his eyes. He has often felt its austere approach before; when it comes it bursts in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world cannot rein back its greed, not when it has virtually won. Isidore wonders if the others who have remained on Earth experience the void this way, or if it is peculiar to his own peculiar biological identity as a special. He lives alone in a deteriorating building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, and he knows that eventually everything within the building will merge into faceless, identical kipple piled to the ceiling, and then the building itself will settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then he himself will be dead. The only way he can escape this despair is by grasping the handles of his empathy box and fusing with Wilbur Mercer.

Despair as a Consequence of Bounty Hunting

Rick Deckard's despair emerges not from the emptiness of the world but from the moral weight of his work. After retiring Luba Luft, he tells Phil Resch he is getting out of the business. He says he will emigrate to Mars. When Resch argues that someone has to do it, Rick insists they can use androids — much better if andys do it. He cannot anymore; he has had enough. She was a wonderful singer, he says; the planet could have used her. This is insane. Later, after the encounter with Rachael Rosen at the St. Francis Hotel, Rick experiences a deeper despair. He realizes that no bounty hunter has ever gone on after being with Rachael, except Phil Resch, who is nutty. Rick feels numb, completely, throughout his entire body. When he finally retires the last three androids — Pris Stratton, Irmgard Baty, and Roy Baty — he sits alone in the apartment and thinks, "What a job to have to do. I'm a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows." He remembers Mercer's words: he is required to do wrong. Everything he has done has been wrong from the start.

The Tomb World and the Failure of Fusion

Despair in the novel is also the condition of the tomb world, the place Mercer sinks into when he is struck down at the top of the hill. John Isidore experiences this tomb world after Pris Stratton mutilates the spider and Buster Friendly exposes Mercerism as a fraud. He sees the dust and the ruin of the apartment spreading out everywhere; he hears the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms. When he reaches out and touches the wall, his hand breaks the surface and gray particles trickle down. The chair comes apart in his hands. The ceramic cup cracks. He walks unsteadily into the living room and thinks of the corpse of the spider with its four remaining legs. Everything in here is old, he realizes; it long ago began to decay and it won't stop. The corpse of the spider has taken over. He finds himself in the tomb world again, but this time Mercer is not there with him. Only when the mutilated spider creeps across his foot, alive again, does he sense Mercer's presence. Mercer lifts him from the tomb world, but the despair of that place — the absolute isolation, the decay, the absence of life — remains a permanent possibility.

The Thematic Significance of Despair

Despair in the novel is not merely a personal emotion but a structural feature of the post-war world. It is the natural response to a planet where the dust has won, where species have gone extinct, where human beings have emigrated and left empty buildings behind. The mood organ can produce it on demand, but it also arises unbidden from the silence of abandoned apartments. Mercerism offers a temporary escape through fusion, but even Mercer cannot save himself; he can only show others that they are not alone. The novel's final image — Rick Deckard sleeping while Iran orders artificial flies for an electric toad — suggests that despair can be held at bay, but only through a kind of willed illusion, a decision to care for something that is not really alive. The electric toad, like the electric sheep, like the empathy box itself, is a fragile bulwark against the despair that waits in the silence.