22 pages • 44 minutes read
Philip K. DickWe Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Douglas Quail
Protagonist Douglas Quail goes through three very different identities during the course of the story, as he ostensibly regresses through his recovered memories. At the beginning of the story, Quail is a dull, uninteresting office clerk who hates his boring life and whose marriage is falling apart; the only way for him to escape this reality is to dream of going Mars, which becomes a symbol of the unknown. Quail wants to go on an adventure but, more importantly, he wants to be important. When Quail dreams of Mars, he is not just dreaming of a vacation to another planet. Instead, he is dreaming of being someone more significant than his immediate surroundings would suggest.
Desperate, Quail buys a memory implant procedure from Rekal, a company that fulfills fantasies by creating fake memories. Quail’s implant will convince him that he was once an assassin who had a secret mission on Mars, a fantasy that would satisfy Quail’s desires without any of the risk. To heighten the realism, Rekal will plant physical evidence in Quail’s apartment as part of their standard procedure; this multifaceted approach effectively means that from this point of the story on, readers cannot tell whether Quail’s recovered memories are real or implanted. However, Quail seems to discover that he really is a secret agent and that his fantasy is effectively reality. Quail’s second personality emerges at Rekal: His demeanor changes and the sweaty, nervous clerk changes into a powerful, proactive secret agent. He can now fight Interplan agents (or at least can imagine himself doing so as part of the implanted fantasia). But his newfound physical prowess is not enough; confronted by Interplan, Quail begs them to erase his assassin persona and return him to his previous safe life.
The final memory implants bring about Quail’s final change in personality. Quail is revealed to be the Earth’s sole protector from invading aliens. The final personality is a synthesis of the two previous personalities: Quail gets his wish in that he is an important person, but he does not need to risk his life. He can be passively important; without doing anything other than existing, Quail is the most significant person on Earth. Quail gets what he wants and in the fashion that he wants it. He can return to his dull, boring life, happy in the knowledge that he is saving the world by staying alive.
Kirsten Quail
When we first meet Quail’s wife Kirsten, it is clear that she considers Quail’s fixation with Mars ludicrous and, more generally, views her husband with contempt. Her infrequent appearances in the story paint her as an angry, dissatisfied woman, who frequently shouts at Quail and threatens to leave him.
How we interpret Kirsten depends highly on which version of Quail we think is real: despondent office worker or secret agent assassin. In the first case, Kirsten may be overly aggressive, but her accusations make sense: Her husband is obsessed with taking a trip he could never afford, secretly decides to get a brain implant without consulting with her, and ignores her the one time she is warm towards him (when she suggests an underwater hotel stay). As Quail himself thinks ruefully, Kirsten is only doing a “wife’s job to bring her husband down to Earth” (4). If Quail’s boring life is real, then Kirsten is a daily reminder of his failures, and her leaving is the culmination of their failing marriage.
On the other hand, once Quail is under the influence of his recovered or implanted memories, he considers whether Kirsten might be an Interplan agent put in place to monitor him. Now, her actions seem sinister: Whenever he tells her about his fantasies of Mars, she convinces him to remain on Earth, tethering him to his routine and preventing him from achieving his dreams or understanding the reality of his past. Only when Interplan has to eliminate Quail altogether can Kirsten quit the assignment (i.e. leave the marriage). In this case, Kirsten’s resentment towards Quail is not Quail’s fault: She is locked into a marriage to a man she barely knows and is forced to play the role of a wife on behalf of a government agency. It is tempting to conclude that Quail would prefer this version of Kirsten—it exculpates him from any responsibility for their disintegrating marriage and positions her as an obstacle he must overcome rather than a person whom he has wronged.
McClane
McClane, a salesman at Rekal, sells a memory implant deal to Quail which will make Quail believe that he has travelled to Mars as a secret agent—partly because of implanted memories, and partly because Rekal will plant convincing souvenirs and other trip detritus in Quail’s apartment, as part of Rekal’s standard operating procedure.
McClane’s slick, deal-making approach to conversation casts him as a quintessential capitalist operator, making memories into commodities he can sell. His business is creating false realities, adding confusion and disinformation to the world with a shrug. He is so profit-focused that even when Quail’s procedure runs into a problem, McClane orders his technicians to wipe Quail’s memory and send him home with half a refund (though of course, anything McClane does after Quail is first sedated is potentially part of Quail’s delusion). When this point on, McClane’s only real focus is the safety of his company. He wants to protect his income and is willing to do anything to do so.
If Quail is indeed recovering repressed memories every time he goes to Rekal, then McClane is a straightforward characterization of an unscrupulous businessman. In this version of the story, McClane is assured of his reality and confident about his place in the world until he discovers the truth about Quail’s role in preventing an alien invasion and realizes that his existence is a great deal more precarious that he thought. McClane becomes sweaty and nervous: His life and his money are under threat because the fate of the world hangs on a non-monetary transaction—Quail’s empathetic appeal to the aliens.
However, if Quail’s increasingly baroque revelations are the result of the Rekal implant, then McClane is an equally sinister agent: the producer of illusions for desperate people. In this version of the story, McClane preys on those eager to escape reality, feeding them infantilizing fiction about their fundamental importance in the world for profit.
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By Philip K. Dick
