Rick Deckard

Lore & Background

In the original novel, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who becomes a specialist plainclothes police officer with the San Francisco Police Department in the early 21st century, responsible for killing androids that escape from off-world colonies. Deckard is married to Iran, one of the more empathetic characters in the novel. She descends into a depression over the state of humanity, and is able to find the empathy necessary to care for an electric toad at the end of the novel.

In the 1982 film Blade Runner, Harrison Ford portrayed Deckard. In the film, the bounty hunters are replaced by special police personnel called 'Blade Runners', and the androids are called 'replicants', terms not used in the original novel. The novel depicts Deckard as an obsequious and officious underling who is human and has a wife, but because of the many versions of the film and the script, the backstory of the movie version of Deckard becomes unclear.

Whether Deckard is a human or replicant and therefore even has a past is left ambiguous. The voice-over in the theatrical release indicates Deckard is divorced, as it mentions an ex-wife. However, the voice-over has been removed from subsequent versions and so this detail is not mentioned. If the viewer takes the perspective that Deckard is a replicant then the 'ex-wife' only becomes an implanted memory.

Reader's Guide

According to M. Blake Wilson, Deckard, the most famous of Dick's criminal justice professionals, is 'one of the most humanized human cops in literature', showing a wide range of emotions and empathy, something that was further explored in the movie sequel (Blade Runner 2049) through the character of K. His name has been interpreted by many as a reference to the Renaissance philosopher René Descartes. In the context of the philosophy of mind, dualism is most closely associated with Descartes, who argued that the mind is a non-material and therefore non-spatial substance distinct from the physical body.

He identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, while treating the brain as a physical organ responsible for intellectual processes. Through this distinction, Descartes formulated the mind–body problem in a form that has remained central to philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body to this day. This issue also constitutes one of the central themes of Dick's novel.