Reality Within a Perspective

Reality within a Perspective

The great Albert Einstein once said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. As I live through my life, my reality only revolves around my school life, not the actual society in which I live in. Which ultimately means I'm not aware of other realities: such as the reality of an average business man, or a policeman. Due to my current perspective of my life, my reality is only an illusion for the time being. In Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", main character Douglas Quail struggles to determine his reality due to multiple memories and perspectives. Although it may seem that the main purpose of Dick writing the story was to demonstrate the conflict of man vs. bureaucracy, he wrote "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" to show that people's realities are illusions because they are easily deceived by the people's perspectives leading them to question their reality.

Although it may seem that Dick's purpose of writing the story was to reveal the conflict of man vs. bureaucracy, he wrote the story to show that realities are only illusions. The main character in the story, Quail, has an ongoing conflict with Interplan, a company within the story which represents an agency or a system of government. In many of Dick's stories, the greater authority is a conflict for the characters. For instance, in "The Man in the High Castle", Frank Fink and other characters in the story struggle under an Imperialistic rule. However, the story revolves around Quail's reality, which he confuses with his other realities due to changes in his environment. Therefore, his realities change and are just illusions.

The purpose of the story is to show that people's realities are illusions because they are easily deceived by the people's perspectives. In the story, Douglas Quail desires to visit Mars, but since he can never afford to do so as a clerk, he visits Rekal Incorporation to request a "false memory implanted that corresponds to a trip that he actually took [and] a false reason which [was] the real reason" which claims the fact that Quail's realities are altered due to his change of environments. His reality is different in the "memory" that has been implanted because he has a life of an agent from Interplan. Not only does he believe he was a secret agent from Interplan, but he also believes he's an important hero because of an implanted childhood memory. The Rekal Incorporations engineers decided to plant another memory into Quail leading him to believe "[the aliens] won't invade Earth as long as [he's] alive", which demonstrates that the extra piece of memory placed into his childhood memory makes him feel important. Before, he only thought of himself as an ordinary clerk and within his reality,