Phillip K. Dick “The Man in the High Castle.” Chapter 4:

In this novel Dick paints a scenario in which the Nazi and the Japanese Imperial army had won WWII and has divided the US and the world into two parts, each belonging to one another. The reason Dick has done so is not political but because he wants to immerse his characters in the winner/loser situation of a world where its inhabitants are subjected to the rules of victors over defeated.

The narrative traces the lives of several ordinary people caught in a maze of hierarchical structures; the cogs of commerce and economic and social relations. All of them subjected to the absurdities of having to serve higher powers. People who has lost everything or who were not born with anything; the dispossessed or so call loser who try to redeem himself by starting a new business, seeking success to boost his self-steem and position in life and recover his wife back; she who goes around with men trying also to rise her self-steem. Or the careerist who change his name and identity with plastic surgery and forge strong connections with the powers that be. Even those who apparently have a better position in life are trapped in the assigned cell of the social pyramid.

I’m dumbfounded by Dick’s capacity for paranoid thinking, which makes him look for universal connections in all aspects of human life. Trans-personalization; the capacity to break the unity of the self and link it to external objects, allows him to blend his characters with multiple spatial and time environments. What some may call delusions of grandeur or ego-centrism, is the center for rationalization and concatenation of external events to one’s thoughts and will.

Individuals are caught into conditions that are alternative realities or possible scenarios according to a view of history as something that doesn’t follow causal relations or obey a concatenation of events, but that occur by mere fortuity or chance. But we also are who we are by constructing reality and setting up in motion the events of history with our thoughts and actions.

In this particular fragment the protagonist, after being fired from his position at an antiques forgery factory, comes back to claim his tools only to find out his best friend offering him to start a new business. This offer he accepts after much questioning and reflecting on the I Ching riddles; which is another of Dick’s favorite themes in this novel, say the preoccupation with destiny and what the future have in his magic purse for us.


“ Hell, he thought, it has to be one or the other; it can’t be both. You can’t have good fortune and doom simultaneously.

Or . . . can you?

The jewelry business will bring good fortune; the judgment refers to that. But the line, the goddamn line; it refers to something deeper, some future catastrophe probably not even connected with the jewelry business. Some evil fate that’s in store for me anyhow . . .

War! He thought. Third World War! All frigging two billion of us killed, our civilization wiped out. Hydrogen bombs falling like hail.

Oy gewalt! He thought. What’s happening? Did I started it in motion? Or is someone else tinkering, somebody I don’t even know? Or –the whole lot of us. It’s the fault of all those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance of the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh. I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. And who am I? The wrong person, I can tell you that.

I should take my tools, get my motors from McCarthy, open my shop, start my piddling business, go on despite the horrible line. Be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best as I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind. That’s what the oracle is telling me. Fate will poleax us eventually anyhow, but I have my job in the meantime; I must use my mind, my hands.

The judgment was for me alone, for my work. But the line; it was for us all.
I’m too small, he thought. I can only read what’s written, glance up an then lower my head and plod along where I left off as if I hadn’t seen; the oracle hasn’t expect me to start running up and down the street, squalling and yammering for public attention.

Can anyone alter it? He wondered. All of us combined . . . or one great figure . . . or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

Closing the book, he left the lounge and walked back to the main work area. When he caught sight of McCarthy, he waved him over to one side where they could resume talk.
“The more I think about it,” Frink said, “the more I like your idea.”
“Fine,” McCarthy said. Now listen. Here is what you do. You have to get money from Wyndam-Matson.” He winked, a slow, intense, frightened twitch of his eyelid. “I figured out how. I’m going to quit and go in with you. My designs, see. What’s wrong with that, I know they are good.”

(…)

“Okay,” Frink said, a little dazed.
McCarthy gave him a slap on the shoulder and went off.

I’ve gone a long way, Frink said to himself. In the last ten minutes. But he did not feel apprehensive; he felt, now, excitement.
It sure happened fast, he thought as he walked over to his bench and began collecting his tools. I guess that’s how those kind of things happen. Opportunity when it comes—

All my life I’ve waited for this. When the oracle says “something must be achieved” –it means this. The time is truly great. What is the time, now? What is this moment? Six at the top in Hexagram Eleven changes everything to Twenty-Six, Taming Power of the Great. Yin becomes yang; the line moves and a new Moment appears. And I was so off stride I didn’t even notice!” (Dick 46-47).

Turns out, these two souls have possibly concocted an idea to start a forgery business that could ruin the life of several other people along the way. Ying-Yang, dualism, bright and dark, the happiness of one is the suffering of another; the good fortune of one person is the fatality or another person; the world cannot exist without the two events happening at the same time; Benjamin and Adorno, they both have good things and bad things.

I cannot tell you what happens after in the novel while I haven’t finished yet. So now I have to keep reading... Ahhh ... Dick.


Work Cited:

Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle. The Library or America, 2007.