The Man in the High Castle Analysis

We sometimes roll our eyes when people say, "the setting is almost like a character." But here, even we have to admit that the setting is pretty important. Info about the big picture of the setting...

Here's how to imagine a limited third person point of view: picture a camera sitting on a character's shoulder, one of those cameras that can look into that person's mind. (That's easy to imagine,...

You could probably write a pretty good short paper on this question: Is The Man in the High Castle science fiction? In fact, this issue becomes a question inside this book, when Paul and Betty Kaso...

Philip K. Dick gives his character enough rope with which to hang themselves. That is, the narrator never dips in to wag his finger at his characters; instead, the narrator takes a hands-off approa...

Because of the "POV" of The Man of the High Castle, we get all of our information through people's eyes (and biases). For instance, when Tagomi goes to the Japanese government lecture on the potent...

In The Man in the High Castle, "the man in the high castle" is Hawthorne Abendsen, the author who lives in a fortified house that is called—wait for it—"The High Castle" (6.116). However, Abend...

That's totally a fair question, because this book has a weird ending. Just to briefly recap, here's the ending position of the five major POV characters:Tagomi freed Frank Frink, then had a heart a...

Philip K. Dick wrote very fast because he needed to make money to eat. (It's one of the best things about money: that we can trade it for food.) So, most of his books aren't difficult to read becau...

Imagine every one of the five main characters as if they were toy cars on a slot race-track, and the exposition is their starting positions: Frank Frink makes fake antiques but has trouble with his...

Yeah, it sounds weird to call this a comedy since we don't laugh too much at Nazis (okay, except for this, of course). But comedy here mostly means that we move from bad to good—from confusion an...

Everyone starts a new project: Tagomi thinks he's starting a new trade mission with Baynes; Baynes comes with his secret mission; Frank starts his new business; Juliana finds a new guy; and Childan...

Man in the High Castle scores low on the "twins and doubles"-meter, whereas many of Dick's works push that trope hard. Sometimes that means robot impostors of real people; and in Dr. Bloodmoney it...

Even if the Nazis won, there would still be a lot of sex in the world. (Although, as Juliana notes, the Nazis might have some sexual hang-ups (3.62).) We don't see any sex, thankfully, but it's cle...

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1.11) was president. World's Fair (1.11), probably the one in 1933, in ChicagoWPA (1.26), possibly the Works Progress Administration, which was a New Deal program (which...