The idea for The Man in the High Castle is really great. What would happen if we lost the second world war? Philip K. Dick delves into this realm, and comes out with quite the story. What he came up with was a world where everything is fake. People, artifacts, intentions- none of it can be trusted because it’s fake. Even the whole reality of the characters in the novel becomes fake. We see a similar thing happening in Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried. He tells war stories, but even the stories didn’t happen. He’ll go and say “I killed this one guy” but then turn around and say “no I didn’t everyone else did, and I just watched”. It’s such a trippy concept, and what do you know? Our whole class is based off of that idea. What a wonderful life! I’ll probably come out of this class paranoid and scared.
I'm not entirely convinced that Juliana did accept that she was a fictional character. "She walked on without looking again at the Abendsen house and, as she walked, searching up and down the streets for a cab or a car, moving and bright and living, to take her back to her motel." (last page, in mine 123)
ReplyDeleteIf Juliana had accepted that her world was a fiction, a lie, a shadow world why would the cab/car be described as "moving and bright and living"? I think Juliana simply accepts that there are things she doesn't understand and then she moves back into her world as she knows it.
Blogspot is retarded, that post applies to the next blog. WTF?
ReplyDeleteI think O'Brien's point wasn't so much as to falsify reality as to suggest that just because something didn't happen to you doesn't make it untrue, or you any less responsible, even if you weren't actually present.
ReplyDeleteThat's the beauty of breaking everything down in your life to understand it. Once you start to understand how something works, you get paranoid about the plausible things that could go wrong. It's like how you know that swine flu is going around and every time someone gets sick, that's what you expect it to be. Now, every time we hear someone tell us a story, we're going to automatically assume that some detail, big or small, is not true.
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