The poetics of cyborg characters in the novels of Philip K. Dick

Abstract

This article theorizes a poetics of cyborg characterization in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969), and A Scanner Darkly (1977) by tracking how four narratological modes—monologue, dialogue, landscape, and portrait—jointly construct and destabilize posthuman identity. I argue that Dick’s androids and cyborg-adjacent figures are not defined by visible prosthesis but by performative and ethical legibility: interior focalization (monologue) stages crises of empathy and self-recognition; interrogative exchanges (dialogue) function as para-Turing procedures in which cadence, wit, and affect become evidence for or against the “human”; material environments (landscape)—dust-choked postwar cities, entropic retrogressions, and surveillance-suburban banalities—externalize ontological precarity; and descriptive imaging (portrait) withholds or misdirects surface markers, forcing readers to read behavior over morphology. Close readings show how Deckard’s shifting interiority, the half-life chatter and advertising patter of Ubik, and Arctor’s split consciousness in the scramble suit recalibrate the human/machine boundary as a moving target indexed to empathy, memory, and consent. Comparative soundings against William Gibson’s surface minimalism, Marge Piercy’s communitarian cyborg humanism, Pat Cadigan’s neural interiorities, and Annalee Newitz’s biopolitical ethics clarify Dick’s distinctive synthesis: a poetics of mimetic ambiguity in which tests, talk, and terrain author subjectivity as much as circuitry does.