The book is a slight modification of actual history.
Throughout the story there are multiple occurrences of the book "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy." It is found in many places and with different types of people, suggesting how popular this book is in the book. There is a lot of racial tension in part because of foreign occupation, but the I Ching definitely is a symbol for the racial tensions in this new society.Īn Alternative History Within an Alternative History The Japanese brought the I Ching to America after the war which brings me to explain how it symbolizes Childan's racism because he says, ""Only the white races endowed with creativity" (117). It sort of interconnects everything in the story through all the different prophecies that people receive. The I Ching makes it's appearance in the book numerous times and in all the plots. The I Ching is supposed to translate your readings, telling your prophecy. To get each line you are supposed to flip a coin with each flip telling you if it is broken/unbroken and whether that line is fixed/moving. Each line is either unbroken (Yang Line) or broken (Yin Line) as well as being fixed or moving (a moving line switches between yin and yang and comes with a special message). Dick himself used the I Ching to write this book, which explains its open ending.The I Ching is made up of 64 hexagrams/symbols with each hexagram having six lines. The I Ching is an old Chinese book from the Zhou Dynasty that is used for fortune telling. One explanation I came up with is that in chapter 6, we discover that the author of the book "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," a man named Hawthorne Abendsen, lives in Cheyenne Wyoming and in a place called the "high castle." Later on we discover that the leader of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, implements a leaning system called the "Castle System."These two descriptions could be used by Dick as polar opposites of each other with Abendsen's anti-Nazi literature contrasting with Reinhard Heydrich's important pro-Nazi training. But I personally believe that the reason Dick does not explicitly explain the title is because he wishes to leave it up to the reader to develop their own reasons why it is called what it is. This is probably Dick's motivation for using the title because it is the most obvious analysis. I knew that the book was about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's control over America, so I thought that the man in the "high castle" would be someone like Hitler or Hirohito. At first I thought that the title was supposed to relate to how an authoritarian has ultimate power in a society, hence the man in the high castle. Before I started reading "The Man in The High Castle" I wondered what the importance of the title was.
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