The Man in The High Castle - Themes

Themes

The interpretation and confusion of true and false realities is the principal theme of The Man in the High Castle; it is explored several ways:

• Robert Childan grasps that most of his antiques are counterfeit, thus, becomes paranoid that his entire stock might be counterfeit; a theme common to Dick's writing (cf. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), wherein the counterfeit is better than the original, because it is functionally real, e.g. the .44 caliber Colt Army Model 1860 revolver indistinguishable by anyone but an expert armorer, as Tagomi's shoot-out demonstrates.

• Wyndham-Matson, himself a collector, has a Zippo cigarette lighter with documentation attesting to its having been in FDR's coat pocket when he was assassinated. He compares it with another similar lighter, inviting her to "feel the historicity", despite, of course, his fortune depending upon genuine counterfeits.

• Several characters are secret agents traveling under assumed persona and pretenses; the gentile "Frank Frink" is the counterfeit persona of the Jew "Frank Fink".

• The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book-within-a-book, postulates an alternative universe where the Axis lost World War II to the Allies, albeit with an alternative sequence of events. It is an alternative history analogue of The Man in the High Castle. The interpenetration of two false realities illustrates that the idea of a false and a true reality is inaccurate, because there exist more than two realities.

• The Edfrank jewelry more resembles 1960s American folk art than it does Japanese and German art; its connections with deeper reality manifested in the effect exerted upon the characters who handle it.

• Novelist Hawthorne Abendsen, the eponymous Man in the High Castle, lives in a house after having lived in a castle (fortified house) that was more prison than home, yet, for the sake of perception (false reality) he perpetuates the myth of his fortified isolation.

• At the end of the novel, Hawthorne Abendsen and Juliana Frink consult the I Ching — it tells them they are living in an immaterial (false) world.

• Tagomi briefly perceives an alternative world upon meditating over a pin containing a Wu (Satori) form of "inner truth"; said Frank Frink artifact transports him to a San Francisco city where white folk do not defer to the Japanese, possibly the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In this world the Embarcadero Freeway runs through downtown San Francisco, whereas in Tagomi's world it does not exist. This suggests that the world might in fact be our own.

• In Operation Dandelion, a false need for military action in the Rocky Mountain States is used to hide an attack on mainland Japan.

The authorial Dick asks: "Who, and what, are the agents behind this interpenetration of true and false realities?" and "Why do those agents desire that the artifice of said realities be recognized?" These thematic questions also feature in the novels Ubik, VALIS, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

The Man in the High Castle deals with justice and injustice (Frink flees Nazi racist persecution); gender and power (the relationship between Juliana and Joe); the shame of cultural inferiority and identity (Childan's new-found confidence in American culture via his limited nostalgia and obsession with antiques); and the effects of fascism and racism upon culture (the devaluation of life under Nazi world totalitarianism and the presumptions of Japanese, German, and American racial superiority), cf. cultural hegemony.