Essay: Artistic Ability as Defamiliarizer
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go both explore the topic of personhood. In both novels, a group of humanoid beings is brought into existence for a specific purpose; in both novels, these beings are utilized and killed by their creators and are denied the privileges of their human counterparts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, six androids are pursued by bounty hunter Rick Deckard after they kill their human masters. In Never Let Me Go, the English boarding school students of Hailsham are in fact children who have been raised to serve as organ donors for humans with cancer. In both books, the creative capacities of these beings are examined as evidence of their possible personhood. Although creativity does not serve as sufficient evidence of personhood, it can provoke a reassessment of the status of these beings that is necessary for their ultimate consideration as persons. On its own, artistic capacity is neither a sufficie