The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle is a 1962 alternative history novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in the United States, 15 years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies in World War II and the U.S. submitted to German and Japanese military occupation.

Themes

The most prominent theme in The Man in the High Castle is the question of the penetration of true reality into a false reality. This can be seen in several aspects of the novel.

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• Robert Childan discovers that many of his antiques are fakes and becomes paranoid that his entire stock consists of counterfeits.
• Several characters are spies, traveling under false names and pretenses.
• Although not describing the historical scenario, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book-within-a-book, portrays actual history more accurately than The Man in the High Castle itself.
• The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is essentially the alternate-history counterpart of The Man in the High Castle in that, to the characters inhabiting the fictonal world, the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the fiction. This implies the penetration of two false realities suggesting that even the idea of two realities, true and false, is incorrect and that there are multiple realities.
• The Man in the High Castle of the book's title actually lives in a normal house.
• At the novel's end, it is implied that a few characters, through consultation with the I Ching, discover that their world is fictional.
• One character seems to briefly become cognizant of the real world.

With this theme, Dick suggests the questions, who or what is the agent causing this inter-penetration of realities? And why does that agent desire that this reality be known as an artifice? This theme is addressed further in several subsequent Dick novels, including Ubik, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and Valis.

Related Topics:
Ubik - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Valis

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The Man in the High Castle also deals with themes of justice and injustice (through Frink's fleeing from Nazi persecution), gender and power (through Juliana's relationship with Joe), shame and identity (through Childan's new confidence in American culture), and the effects of fascism on culture (throughout the novel, especially sections in dealing with the lack of value of life in the wake of Nazi dominance of the world).

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