Thursday, May 9, 2013

The Philip K. Dick Reader


While reading the stores at first it was a bit difficult to try and find a way in which they were all related; however after lecture I can see some of the ideas behind the readings.

For example in some of the readings, such as The Chromium Fence, We Can Remember for You Wholesale, and Paycheck  there is a sense of trying to figure out one’s own identify by the main characters of the stories; Don is at conflict over which side to choose, Douglas Quail trying to fulfill is dream of becoming someone he has  dreamed to be (a man whose gone to Mars), and Jennings who tries to figure out what happened the past two years of his life while he was working for an odd company.  While these stories deal with a search for one’s own individual, The Father Thing deals more with the possible threat to our individualism, as the father becomes replaced by some creature and it later turns out that there is more of these imposter creatures.

In We Can Remember for You Wholesale and Paycheck, there seems to be Philip’s idea that memories are who make us who we are, therefore there is an implicit question, if our memories were altered who would we be?

One of the readings I thought had a deeper meaning, or perhaps more obvious meaning to it was The Chromium Fence as it seemed to foreshadow the attitudes of our future generations.  The story almost seemed as a warning for us to take a look at we put most emphasis on and value because those will be the ideas that the younger generations will take as the most important, the ones “worth dying for.”

No comments:

Post a Comment