We have talked in class about how when the I Ching actually gives a true prediction, it is true because the oracle’s predictions are so vague that users can interpret them based on what they feel is true. Dick seems to support this idea. When Frank Frink gets an answer from the oracle that contradicts itself, giving him a good omen and a bad omen, he decides that the good omen was about Edfrank Jewelry but the bad omen referred to “something deeper, some future catastrophe probably not even connected with the jewelry business” (p. 51). This could refer to anything, especially in a world with such potential for nuclear war. Therefore, when Frink decides this refers to a Third World War, this comes from his own personal fears and not from a direct communication by the oracle.

At the end of the book, Juliana and Abendsen ask the oracle why it wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. They receive the hexagram that means “Inner Truth.” If I had been in their place I would have decided that it meant that the themes of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy were true, or as with The Things They Carried that the truth was emotional rather than literal. But both Juliana and Abendsen immediately decide that it means everything in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the truth, the Axis powers lost the war, and that their reality is false. I feel we have to assume that Juliana and Abendsen make this interpretation because they have had previous suspicions, perhaps similar to the experience Mr. Tagomi had with the Edfrank pin. Juliana and Abendsen are reading the I Ching like we read The Man in the High Castle in this class. The truth we pull out is based on what we already know or believe. I think that if we as readers can take from The Man in the High Castle that we should question our reality, it is not because this is what Dick is telling us directly, but because we have found reason in our lives to question our realities.