Rick vs Rachael

Dick put a few instances in his novel where the reader is believed to know one thing, than it twists into something different, then does something different again. One thing that caught my attention was Rick's "relationship" with Rachael. Though he questioned his job at the point where Luba Luft was killed, I think Rachael played an important role in his so called revelation as well. He sees her as almost real, has sex with her, and for a while thinks he loves her. Then, when they are in the car and moments after he says he'd marry her if it was legal, things turn. The reader finds out Rachael used Rick, more than he used her, when she says "no bounty hunter has gone on ...after being with me. Except one..."(198). In an attempt it seems Rachael tries to make Rick see that they are real by something so intimate as sexual induction and that he would see the androids in a new, sentimental eye...however, do to her lack of empathy, Rachael gave away her plan of swaying Rick, who becomes somewhat hurt or betrayed by it all. Interstingly, Rachael thinks she can read Rick by "that expression...that grief" (199) on his face. Here she is only reading him intellectually rather than emotionally, which she is unable. At this point Rick now sees her again as an "it" rather than a "she."

Though Rick doesn't kill Rachael, he goes on to kill the other three androids, mainly because of what this Mercer told him, which could possibly be what he trully felt seeing as how he claimed he was Mercer (which I got a bit confussed with). Rachael's Nexus-6 brain, more android than human, lost in the battle that she tried to wage with Rick and his human empathy toward androids, where in the end he did what he felt he must and ultimately kill the androids. (However, in her own way Rachael won too in killing something dear to Rick as the other androids were "dear" to her.) All in all Rick felt "required to do wrong," but maybe deep down near the end of the novel it didn't seem so wrong to him, he started seeing the andriods as "its" again, he thought "savagely" towards them, called them "stupid," etc. Finally, in the last pages Rick says "sometimes it is better to do something wrong than right" (242). What can we really make of all these jagged turns Dick puts in his novel?