ŷ������

I just finished the book and my immediate take-away is something I find a little weird.
(view spoiler)[I'm a little sad that the toad turned out to be electric. When Deckard found it, I thought we had a happy ending where he could get the mentioned prize for finding an extinct animal and live the life he thought he should with Iran. I'm not sure why I'm dwelling on that detail, but I can't stop thinking about what could have happened in the end. (hide spoiler)]

I had basically the same reaction.

Reality doesn't have happy endings, and Mercer won't come save you from getting hit by the rocks.

I was sad to find out that it was electric too. I was hoping that maybe the animals would be making a comeback to the world.

Yeah, I had originally taken

(view spoiler)[the toad to mean that the natural world was coming back and that the planet would recover from the radioactive dust. No such luck. (hide spoiler)]

Yeah, the toad didn't really make logical sense to me. Maybe as another tool in the story to illustrate the futility of the lives of people left on Earth? (view spoiler)[ Why would there be an electric toad out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles away from any civilization or humanity. The area was supposedly completely abandoned and no humans ever went there... The likelihood of an electric toad being there at that exact location seems so far-fetched in the context of the story. While the live spider makes sense in J.R.'s apartment building, the electric toad in the wasteland did not. (hide spoiler)].

Thoughts?

It didn't make sense to me either, Buzz. Which I think may be part of the reason I was so upset (view spoiler)[when it turned out to be electric. Having a random electric animal in the abandoned wastelands of northern California did not make sense at all. I was thinking about it from a writer's perspective, that Dick might have felt it was necessary to get the audience's hope up for a grand happy ending before delivering a fairly underwhelming ending to highlight his theme on questioning reality.

I also thought that maybe the mechanical toad out there in the wilderness was there for a contrast to J.R.'s spider. The spider was real, but thought extinct, and found surviving in an urban setting. The toad, unreal, was surviving in a wild setting. I think that maybe this was to show that all kinds of life can survive in this post-nuclear war era. (hide spoiler)]

The scene with the toad was poignet and relevent.
It's a shame that it did’t fit into the movie.
My take away was that Decker was very emotional about the toad.
Until he heard that is wasn’t ”real��. Very much like the attitude towards replicants. Once you decide their not “real’�� turning them off
is no big deal.

I saw the toad as an extension of the whole Mercerism thing. (view spoiler)[Yes, neither of them are "real", but that doesn't mean that they have no value - Mercer/the toad might lack intrinsic value, but they're valuable/have meaning because people believe they do. That's why the androids don't get Mercerism, and try to expose it as fake. They don't understand that just because something isn't "real" doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Mercer's existence isn't what's important - it's the shared experience and values people got from Mercer/the empathy boxes that matter. (hide spoiler)]

I don't understand why Deckard deserved a happy ending? Other than the fact that he made several comments about how he wanted to get rid of his wife and "she was useless" because she was depressed. Then he killed androids without testing whether they were androids and solely because their name was on a piece of paper. They could've easily been "empathy-lacking humans" that tried to escape from their home world. I actually preferred that he didn't have a happy ending and (view spoiler)[ was over the moon when Rachel got back at him. (hide spoiler)]

Also, I think the reason the androids want to bring down Mercerism is that it's an example of religion used as a method of exclusion. The androids aren't built with empathy so the best way to exclude them from a faith system is to base it around empathy. It is a symbol of everything they lack to get basic rights as people. I would hate it too.

I feel like Mercerism gives people the sense of connection without the substance. The warm fuzzies without the inspiration.

Sean wrote: "I saw the toad as an extension of the whole Mercerism thing. [spoilers removed]"

I'm with Sean on this one.

Maybe it's because I've met too many mystically-oriented religious people, who don't care about the logic/ reality/ history of things ("what if tomorrow we found definitively Jesus' corpse?" "It does not change the reality of the incarnation, of the death and resurrection of the God-man, wherever He was and is" is a conversation I've had many times). Mercer is, regardless of allegations, real in some metaphysical sense, and he is able to give people real, meaningful experiences, both of empathy and of isolation, beyond his existence in the programs of the empathy box.

I think, though, contra Sean, it's not an entirely positive ending. It's a very nuanced, balanced one. Yes, Mercerism is real. Yes, Mercer is real. Yes, Mercer is able to give practitioners some kind of real mystical empathic experience. But. The spider and the toad are electrical. Yes, they are real, and yes, as Deckard notes, they are in their own way alive. Real, valuable, but electrical, and thus limited.

I'm with Anja too, up to a point. Because while it seems like Mercerism is used to exclude androids, Deckard (view spoiler)[ ultimately empathizes with the androids and incorporates them into his practice of Mercerism. Mercer doesn't take away his empathy, he just spurs him on to kill regardless of empathy. (hide spoiler)]
There's something really complicated going on, something strange and paradoxical and I suspect a bit gnostic, that I can't quite wrap my end-of-term addled brain around.

I don't think anyone "deserves" a happy ending.
They deserve the right ending.

I think Sean nailed the toad significance perfectly.

Rob Secundus wrote: "it's not an entirely positive ending."

I'm not entirely sure it is a positive ending, to be honest. I think it all comes down to this - would you prefer a comforting lie, or a harsh truth? There's no right answer.

I had the same disappointed reaction about the toad at first...

Textsplosion: (view spoiler)[but then it sort of seemed like it was okay that it didn't end up working out for them. Disappointing for them, yes, but not necessarily putting them in any worse position than they were in before. It certainly wasn't a good ending, but wasn't bad or dark either. More of a "grey" ending.

If anything the toad made me think of "what is really most important in life?" from the human perspective and helped emphasize further the difference between humans/androids...

If you remember when Rachael and Rick were talking in their hotel room, it was Rachael who said that Rick loved his new goat more than anything else including his wife... And then later Rachael goes and kills his goat to get back at him, because she thinks it's what matters to Rick the most. But to Rick and his wife, they mostly seem relieved that the day is over and that they're both safe now. They're bummed out that the goat didn't work out and the toad didn't work out maybe, but they're basically no worse off than they were at the start of the day and they still have each other.

I'm convinced that if Rachael were capable of truly understanding human emotions, she would have killed his wife instead, and the ending would have been a lot different and a lot darker. Seeing it from that perspective makes me feel relieved for them and like they were lucky to get out of this story alive and (mostly) unharmed. (hide spoiler)]

Mercerism is just another way that people relinquish the agency to assign value to things themselves. In this respect it is just like the Animal Price Guide (my brain can't remember the exact name of it and I'm lazy). And it's just like the emotion box from the beginning.

If there is any differene between the Andys and humans it's that the Andys have no control over what they assign value to/empathize with whereas the humans do have control but they don't exercise it.

Many people don't seem to want the animals for anything but a social symbol (why else would Deckard want a damn Ostrich?) And they don't seem to empathize with Chickenheads anymore than they do andys.

(view spoiler)[ Rachel was trying to strike at Deckard's heart (a human/emotional response if you ask me) with the goat but she didn't realize he didn't have one to begin with. He only had a little dial he could set to his preferred emotional setting. (hide spoiler)]

So what's more terrifying: the andys with selective empathy and penchant for animal cruelty; the humans who are unpreturbed by the fate suffered by a group of...beings almost identical to them (whether andys or chickenheads); or the idea that someone can think of the ending as anything remotely close to "good" or "happy".

I think the toad is there to reinforce that there are no happy endings here. Only a slow decay towards kipple.

"If there is any differene between the Andys and humans it's that the Andys have no control over what they assign value to/empathize with whereas the humans do have control but they don't exercise it."

Do the humans really have control though? Sure they have the ABILITY to empathize, but is there really a conscious effort to feel/ignore it? Deckard felt bad for the Opera android (really sorry, I'm terrible with character names), but it seems like it was only because she was a 'female' and he valued what she was contributing to human culture in art form. It didn't seem like a conscious effort on his part, nor did it stop him from going back and finishing the job on the other Androids. Maybe the humans are just as bad/worse than the Androids who were killing the spider like Matthew mentioned.

Honestly, I felt worse for the spider than I did for anyone else in this book. And a little for the goat too, but I'm assuming it was a tall building and a swift death.

Edit: Also felt bad for the chickenheads. Is it a coincidence that the more "intelligent" beings were in the story, the more they were really just not good people?

I think the author definitely wanted us to question whether humans were really more empathic than the androids.

I took something a little different form this ending. And maybe it's informed by other books he wrote. But I always thought he was exploring how the value of something is entirely rooted in our perceptions. When Decker thinks the Toad is real he is saved. He has found his hope. But when he thinks its fake it all crumbles.

It's not about whether the toad is or isn't mechanical. It's about his belief that it is. Similar to the reason he has an electric sheep which is to make others believe he has a real one.

This is also why I think he makes the Androids physically almost identical to humans. Because he really wants to push the idea of what makes someone human. It starts to become difficult to tell the Androids from the humans without sophisticated tests. if that's the case is their any real difference? Hence the playing with the idea that certain psychological illnesses might fool the tests.

To me the takeaway is that the meaning of something should come from how we interact with it and what it means to us directly, not from some pre-conceived idea of what it's supposed to be.

He plays with this idea in Man in the High Castle too regarding 'historicity' of pre-war objects.

To me, the toad showed Deckard's development. He started out with an electric sheep, and he was growing to hate it, because he viewed it as 'fake', and because he was pretending it was real. Then got the goat, and he was so happy, but also afraid that something bad would happen to it. And it did. The goat was killed. Then he found the toad, and it seemed like one life was replaced by another. But the life wasn't real. It was an electric toad. So he is back to square one. Except when his wife is ordering the flies, she says something about her husband being very attached the the toad. I get the feeling he will cherish it even though it isn't real. He has learned that he can empathise with the Androids, and it seemed he would be suffering guilt after the final killing. His views are shifting, even though he tells himself he cannot hurt Rachael back because of her lack of empathy.

Also, since he can prove the goat was killed by Rachael, he would probably be able to claim money to buy another. This isn't even suggested.