So not much to go on initially. This chapter opens up with a scene of children playing with clay. One of the children, Peter Trilling, is not so much interested in this activity and seems like he’s pretty regularly not let in on the reindeer games. A doctor named Meade arrives and picks up his child Mary. Suddenly, the chapter shifts to a couple, Peg and Ted Barton, who are on vacation from New York to Ted’s hometown of Millgate, Virginia. Peg is none too happy about this trip, seeming like she’d prefer to stay back in the city.
When the couple arrive in the town, Ted is suddenly struck by an overwhelming sensation that the town they are in is somehow not the Millgate he knows.
So a few notes of analysis on this chapter. First, I notice that this takes place in a “modern day” setting, which was not the case for the other early Dick books I’ve read so far save “Eye in the Sky”. I consider this an improvement over his usual space-opera/pulp scifi settings, as I’ve found Dick’s early futures to be cringe-worthy generally, (I swear, women in these early books sometimes seem as though they may as well have been disembodied sentient breasts for all the lack of attention Dick gives to any other part of their appearance). He seems to excel more in these Twilight Zone type scenarios where something is off-kilter about the normal world. So I’ll just say that the premise of a man returning to his hometown to suddenly be struck by the sensation that it isn’t his town at all hits all the right notes for me. I’m generally a fan of Twilight Zone/Kafkaesque predicaments in which a strange event is thrown into a normally functioning world and the characters just have to accept it. Very Lacanian.
The opening with the group of children playing with clay seems like it’ll be important thematically at the very least. Dick occasionally makes use of multiple viewpoint characters, but I don’t know that that will be the case here. If anything, I feel like the children may play a role similar to the rabbits in Inland Empire, functioning as a sort of silent/thematic greek chorus rather than one which directly parallels the plot. Granted, I’m optimistic that this won’t be the case, as the image of children playing with/shaping clay people seems really blatant and unsubtle in a book called “The Cosmic Puppets”. We will see.
When the couple arrive in the town, Ted is suddenly struck by an overwhelming sensation that the town they are in is somehow not the Millgate he knows.
So a few notes of analysis on this chapter. First, I notice that this takes place in a “modern day” setting, which was not the case for the other early Dick books I’ve read so far save “Eye in the Sky”. I consider this an improvement over his usual space-opera/pulp scifi settings, as I’ve found Dick’s early futures to be cringe-worthy generally, (I swear, women in these early books sometimes seem as though they may as well have been disembodied sentient breasts for all the lack of attention Dick gives to any other part of their appearance). He seems to excel more in these Twilight Zone type scenarios where something is off-kilter about the normal world. So I’ll just say that the premise of a man returning to his hometown to suddenly be struck by the sensation that it isn’t his town at all hits all the right notes for me. I’m generally a fan of Twilight Zone/Kafkaesque predicaments in which a strange event is thrown into a normally functioning world and the characters just have to accept it. Very Lacanian.
The opening with the group of children playing with clay seems like it’ll be important thematically at the very least. Dick occasionally makes use of multiple viewpoint characters, but I don’t know that that will be the case here. If anything, I feel like the children may play a role similar to the rabbits in Inland Empire, functioning as a sort of silent/thematic greek chorus rather than one which directly parallels the plot. Granted, I’m optimistic that this won’t be the case, as the image of children playing with/shaping clay people seems really blatant and unsubtle in a book called “The Cosmic Puppets”. We will see.
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