A Study of Robot Identity Writing in Isaac Asimov’s Fiction

Abstract

Isaac Asimov, a famous contemporary American science fiction writer, constructs the identity of robots through describing entities and dialogues in his short story “The Last Question”. If we compare and analyze the author’s other short stories with conceptual metaphor theory and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, we will find that the author pushes the development of the storyline through the constructing the robot’s identity and the blurring of the boundaries, and from then on, maps the development of the relationship between man and machine and the course of its development. The purpose of this paper is to explore the special significance of the construction of robot identity and its contribution to the development of the narrative, as well as to analyze the expectations of the human-machine relationship embedded in the novel.