Special People in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep :: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Essays

Special People in Do Androids conceive of of Electric SheepThe old man said, You will be needed to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity element (156). This statement made me rec both several(prenominal) essays that I read by William Butler Yeats. The central idea in Yeats essays was that we atomic number 18 only raised in a myth. We argon all taught to exist as metaphors, as symbols of some(prenominal)thing supposedly greater than ourselves, and, as woodpecker says, violate your own identity. My response to this supposition is to wonder how are we to find that identity when we have been taught to be something other than that individual identity? And what happens to those who abjure to be symbols? If we are, as Yeats postulates, guiltlessly symbols of something greater then how are we to uncover first what that symbol represents, and second, how that symbol represents our true self? It seems to me tha t as people become symbols they become abstract, something ideal rather than real. Thus, we are all living an illusory existence, an existence created by others. Dick says further, At some time, any creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of insertion this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe (156). I agree with Dicks assertion that every person who lives is handed a metaphor but I excessively believe that the majority of those persons do not even live or acknowledge that they are living as a metaphor. It seems to me that the key to self-discovery is to recognize and acknowledge that you are living a lie that was encoded into your psyche forwards and after your birth. How does one continue to live as a mere symbol after acknowledging such a thing? Of course, millions do provided that. But there are those people in the world that refuse to be metaphors, refuse to be symbols. It is in these people that we receive the head of truth, whether we want it or not. Which brings us to Dicks next statement that, Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind. (13). Now in Dicks interpretation of special, he is referring to those that society deems less than perfect those that do not meet the specifications of the metaphor.