RUR Death Quotes

Domin's right. You can't kill your computer, except metaphorically. But at the same time, we learn later on that Domin is willing to sacrifice lots of people for his vision of the future, since he knows robots will bring about war (or at least he says he does). He's willing to send a robot to the scrap heap just to prove he isn't lying, which seems wasteful and excessive. Killing a robot may not be a moral wrong, but Domin's pride and wastefulness seem like they're character traits that could lead to bad places.

Robots can't die, but they aren't immortal. They're just like chairs. If you don't want to live, Domin is saying, then you're not really alive. If you're not living, you're not mortal—or so Domin claims.

So this is the robots declaring their intention to commit genocide, killing all men and women. The question is, if the robots now want to kill and survive, does that mean that they themselves are alive? And if so, isn't keeping them in servitude a moral evil? The willingness to commit genocide makes the robots mortal; chairs don't want to kill anything.

Hallemeier realizes that they have no chance against the robots, and comes face to face with his own mortality. And not just his mortality, but the mortality of everyone everywhere on earth—the end of the human race. No wonder he uses a bunch of ellipses; that's heavy stuff.

The death they smell is the death of robots, who earlier in the play weren't able to die. Robots here seem to be made out of flesh, more or less, so their death smells like humans dying. And of course robots want to live, so killing them is more like killing a human than like shorting out a toaster. Killing people may be necessary, but laughing about it is sort of gross.

Domin isn't exactly facing death with brave fortitude. Instead, he seems to be falling apart. The approach of death makes him realize that he's always been mortal—or, in other words, he's always been dead.

Alquist is freaking out. Death is coming, and he starts babbling about blood everywhere. We suppose you can't blame him, but still, it's a little tiresome, especially when he goes on and on in the same vein through the last act as well. Why did the robots spare him? What use is mortality if you can't get the right guy to shut up?

They're talking about the death of Busman. He's the first of them to die. But lots of robots have died already—and innumerable humans for that matter. Mortality only counts when it's your group it seems like. Everyone else—human or robot— is just a thing, not a human death.

This is an odd exchange. Alquist says that the robots will perish without people—but the robots will perish anyway, since none of the humans know how to make more of them. The robots' insistence that there are no people seems not quite right either—after all, robots are people themselves, if they have souls. The main point, though, is that everyone—robots or humans—is dead or will die. Bummer.

The robots are giving Alquist the bad news here. He is alone; everyone else on earth is dead. That's a lot of death for you. And what does Alquist do with all that mortality? He soliloquizes. So that's what you do if you're the last person on Earth, Shmoopers. Soliloquies—not much else to do, we suppose.