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This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won.
Before Deckard moves in on his target Luba Luft in Chapter 9, he listens to her rehearsing Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Deckard reflects on the coming annihilation of all things. He is there to kill the singer, but more than that, the song will someday be forgotten. Even the name of Mozart will be forgotten, and all will be lost in the decay of Deckard’s post-apocalyptic world. Deckard knows the entropic nature of life on his ruined planet. In Deckard’s vision, all will come to decay and be forgotten.
He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment.
This quote comes in Chapter 2, in which J.R. Isidore is introduced. Isidore senses the deafening silence of his abandoned building, and the coming victory of “kipple” over the order that humans once imposed on the place. Kipple is a word used to describe the rotten and decaying garbage of abandoned human structures. It is a symbol of the irresistible force of entropy and the inevitability of deterioration and destruction. Isidore sees this inevitable takeover of the Earth by garbage, destroying everything in its path. This process is mirrored in the steady deterioration of Isidore’s brain. He is rotting just like the building around him.
And they, the outstanding members of the illegal group, were also doomed, since if he failed to get them, someone else would. Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.
As Deckard exhaustedly prepares for his final three targets in Chapter 16, he reflects on the inevitability of their destruction, if not by him then by another bounty hunter. Seeing this cycle as a symbol of the universe itself, Deckard views the lives of the androids as destined to end. No matter by what force, all life, even artificial life, must end. The cycle of life and death cannot be overcome. In a way, Deckard has matured, his outlook expanded to include the possibility that android life, though artificial, is still life. However, by taking this nihilist view, Deckard also justifies his increasingly immoral position.
What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start.
In the moments before his attack on Pris Stratton and the Batys in Chapter 19, Deckard feels a sense of bitterness towards his role in the grand cycle of life and death. He thinks of the “ancient curse” that all beings must do wrong in their cycle of living. This shows a change in Deckard and goes against what Deckard previously thought and was taught by Mercerism. Now that Mercer has appeared to Deckard to tell him he must do wrong, Deckard is resigned to it. He must do wrong and kill those who are undeserving of death in order to fulfill his part in the cycle. Deckard now accepts that this cycle cannot be overcome, even by one such as Deckard, who has gained new empathy for the machines.
