43 pages • 1 hour read
Philip K. DickA Scanner Darkly
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Philip K. Dick and 1970s Drug Culture
Iconic science fiction author Philip K. Dick penned numerous novels in the 1960s and 1970s. His earlier work—including such notable titles as The Man in the High Castle (1963 Hugo Award), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner), and Ubik—was more traditional sci-fi/speculative fiction. However, the 1970s marked a transition in his writing. After dabbling in the early 1970s Southern California drug scene, Dick experienced a spiritual epiphany, and his writing began to focus on metaphysical and theological topics. Many of those issues appear in A Scanner Darkly. Characters ponder The Nature of Reality, which, according to Dick, is all a matter of perception. Arctor undergoes a metaphysical crisis when he loses touch with his sense of self. A passage from Goethe’s Faust is cited evoking God as a beacon in an existential wilderness. Dick explored these issues in his subsequent writing—most deeply in his 1981 novel Valis—as he struggled to process his revelation.
Part of that revelation, one which thematically dominates the narrative, is the potentially destructive nature of recreational drugs. Early in his career, Dick wrote many of his novels while under the influence of amphetamines. His prodigious output was driven in part by his use of these drugs—also known as speed—which allowed him to write for long hours without sleep. While his characters, like Dick and his friends, initially see drugs as a gateway to a more profound vision of reality, he eventually realized that they were also a path to destruction. At the end of the novel, the Author’s Note memorializes many of Dick’s friends who died of causes related to substance use disorders. Dick remained fatalistic about their deaths. He does not blame them or the systems they inhabited, and eulogizes them as unwilling to participate in a world they felt was morally toxic. Dick brings his firsthand knowledge of the drug culture and its destructive consequences to a story of people trapped in a society that shuns them when all they really want is a better path forward.
Genre Context: Speculative Fiction
While Dick’s later work leans toward the spiritual and metaphysical, the bulk of his writing fits clearly into the science-fiction/speculative genre. He deals with classic sci-fi tropes: artificial life (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), alternative history (The Man in the High Castle), and authoritarianism and dystopian futures (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale). Dick also exhibits a flair for futuristic gadgetry in inventions such as Arctor’s cephalochromoscope and the drug agency’s scramble suits, memory implantation technology in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the basis for the 1990 film Total Recall), and self-replicating nanobots (his 1955 short story Autofac). Although his themes and use of technology are standard fare for the genre, the way he incorporates them into his fiction is unique. Dick’s fascination with reality—what is it and how do we perceive it—runs through much of his work, and frequently his fictional devices are simply that—devices that enable him to explore what’s really on his mind. The scramble suits serve a definite narrative purpose—to hide agents’ identities from one another—but the confusion that results from speaking to someone hidden behind the suit’s refracting technology becomes internalized until Arctor doesn’t know if he’s Fred the agent, Arctor the suspect, or, later, Bruce the rehab patient. The holo-scanners allow Fred to remotely observe his suspect, but the suspect is really himself, suggesting a schizophrenic break not only in his personal identity but in his very perception of reality.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick uses android detection technology to not only root out murderous robots but to comment on the nature of humanity and the evolution of artificial life. If androids, he asks, are evolving and seeking a more human existence, what is humanity’s obligation toward them? He takes the standard genre tropes and uses them for a larger purpose in a way that has inspired many subsequent writers but also situates them uniquely within the genre. He takes a hard, cynical look at “the very nature of reality itself and…[he] doubts common notions of reality more sincerely and more corrosively than almost any writer in any genre” (Mambrol, Nasrullah, “Analysis of Philip K. Dick’s Novels. Literary Theory and Criticism. 30 May 2018, literariness.org).
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