Renowned author Philip K. Dick reveled in toying with the concept of reality; so much so, in fact, he dedicated an entire novel to the very idea of an alternate timeline in which the Allies lost the second world war, with America now under the brutal occupation of both Germany and Japan, conjointly. That novel, regarded as one of the best in the genre, is 'The Man in the High Castle', and its play on reality was inspired by Eastern Philosophy, in particular a Chinese text used to divine the secrets of alternate realities and worlds concealed by the empty space of the Universe itself, a text known as the I Ching (Brown, E, 2001.).
The theme of reality and its impact upon the "small people leading small lives", as Brown phrases it, is a central theme within the narrative, and its significance to the direction of the plot and its characters practically oozes from every letter of every word from the novel's beginning to its open-ended conclusion (Brown, E, 2001). As the course of the plot drives its central protagonists in their search for complete satisfaction in their lives, they are each soon drawn to the mystical properties of the I Ching, making use of its power in order to find direction and purpose so that they may no longer idle in abject non-fulfilment, trapped in a world that has gone to hell in a hand-basket (Brown, E, 2001.).
According to Brown, the characters are all in search of a Utopian world that is kept from them behind the impassable walls of the fabric of the Universe, an idea that Dick often knowingly perpetuates throughout many of his literary works; meanwhile, the people drowning under the shroud of the occupying enemy's shadow of oppression live alongside a constant feeling of terror and a "sense of claustrophobia", as stated by Brown (Brown, E, 2001.).
Making masterful use of these themes, Dick is able to establish a grim - but somehow ever hopeful - alternate reality that diverges from our world, whilst retaining an eerie sensation of familiarity, allowing us, as the readers, to form empathic connections with the psychology that drives his protagonists as they struggle to come to terms with the grave reality in which they must live and accept as unalterable (Brown, E, 2001.). The author employs the recurring theme that reality may not be as it appears on the surface, the I Ching serving to further shatter our presumptions of what we perceive to be reality, and does so in turn for the protagonists at the heart of the plot as they, like the reader, suffer as its whims dictate (Brown, E, 2001.).
Using the I Ching as the basis upon which to build his story, Dick adheres to a philosophy that is derived from Taoism, incorporating its core belief of the interconnectedness between all things to further develop his characters, whose actions later come to affect each other's lives in significant ways that establishes the course of the plot in the latter half of the story (Brown, E, 2001.). Adding to Brown's thoughts on 'The Man in the High Castle', allow me to contrast these with McKnee's ideas on the novel as outlined in the Reader for Week 8, in which he asserts that that world of the narrative represents the "yin world, in its most melancholy form" (McKnee, 2004.), an Eastern Philosophical paradigm in which the Western notion of good and evil are represented as the Yin and Yang.
According to McKnee, the world in 'The Man in the High Castle' is unbalanced, and it is only through a sort of "spiritual transformation" that this unbalance can be rectified, not simply through the removal of the foreign regimes that govern the setting within the narrative by way of rebellion (McKnee, 2004). This implies that the author believes that the problems plaguing the narrative's setting are not due to the totalitarian regimes central to the tone of the story alone, but rather a far more subversive dilemma that runs deep into the core of the ideologies that dominate the world from behind the scenes, a theme that reverberates again and again as the story progresses.
Dick later personalizes this theme in the form of his "most sympathetic character", according to the opinion of Brown, Juliana Frink, who becomes enamoured with this prospect of the existence of a Utopian alternate world that is revealed to her through the I Ching, and he condenses it further still with his inclusion of 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy', a novel-within-a-novel, but also a reality-within-a-reality (Brown,E, 2001). If you've read the book, I'll trust that you know what happens next.
In summary, Dick's primary theme and concept at the epicentre of his many literary works is his deconstruction of reality and its illusory nature, an idea that was once largely his own, but which is now a derivative trope in the science fiction genre espoused by hack writers. Alternate timelines, once original ideas, are now the standard de rigeur in SF, but never handled with such aplomb as in Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'.
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