Theme of control in Waiting for the Barbarians and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Essay Example

While emotions are integral to the life of humans, the android designers engineered them sans emotions, which make it easier for their designers to control them. The androids can only possess the emotions built into them and, as a result, they have emotional responses that are inappropriate. For example, Isadore’s welcoming gesture elicits an inappropriate reaction from Pris; “….her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange… and, he thought, deplorable. Coldness.it was not what she did….

but what she did not do and say” (Dick 67). Because of control that humans have over the androids, the androids are lacking in empathy. A lack of empathy makes the androids more difficult to control since they cannot have empathy for animals, human beings or even androids in Deckard’s case. Te lack of control over the androids makes it very dangerous to attempt any form of assimilation with the human beings since it prohibits any normal moral or ethical development, which makes them almost impossible to control.

This lack of control among the androids is seen in the instance, whereby Pris mutilates a spider simply because he wanted to experiment and see if it could walk and efficiently function on two legs as was possible with eight legs. A different example is whereby Rachael kills an innocent and defenseless goat. This lack of empathy within the androids makes them very difficult to control for humans and, as such, they are being hunted down. The unseen attributes inherent in the androids also threatens to take them out of the control of humans.

Among other functions, the humans created the androids in order for them to provide slave labor in the off world colonies. One advertisement in the novel shows the androids as “duplicates of the halcyon days of the pre-civil war Southern states (Dick 70). The humans slotted out the androids into slavery in the colonies, and they became hungry for freedom, wanting to do away with human control. The human characteristic was not supposed to be present in the androids, but the androids do attain it.

So strong is the feeling that they begin to kill to attain the freedom that they yearn. Because it is not possible to program objects with an instinct for freedom, this function did develop independently within the androids as they sought for more freedom. Those who programmed the androids, no longer have any control over them, and the amount of control seems to deteriorate until it seems that the positions are reversed with the androids no longer under the control of man with man seeming to serve them.

Deckard makes a comparison between artificial animals and the androids, “within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself towards his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object he thought. …the androids…..had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before the similarity between an electric animal and an Andy"(Dick 20). Isidore begins to live with and serve the androids, showing the reversal of control over the androids.

The theme of control in Waiting for the Barbarians is explored via the class hierarchies and abusive power inherent in the colony frontier. The power and control relations relationships can be related to an oppressor-oppressed notion where power relations exist between the barbarians and the empire. These political and social