The Man in the High Castle Chapters 7 & 8 Summary & Analysis

Chapters 7 & 8

Summary: Chapter 7

Childan goes to the Kasouras’ home, the couple he met in his store. The home is tastefully and minimally decorated in Japanese style. Trying to hide his attraction to Betty Kasoura, Childan turns his attention to a book he spots in the home—The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Paul Kasoura finds the book fascinating, and he muses on a world where Japan lost. This hits a nerve with Childan, who forcefully asserts that if the Japanese lost, the world would be overrun with Communism and the Jewish. The Kasouras, taken aback, tactfully shift the subject. Childan regrets his outburst and rakes himself over for being a boorish white man. He notices, however, how the Kasouras are imposters, drinking from English teacups and serving American food.

Childan is surprised to find a policeman waiting for him back home. Childan immediately notices the man is a pinoc, a white American installed by the Japanese. The policeman asks Childan about someone who recently came to his shop claiming to represent an officer of the Imperial Navy. He asks Childan to ID a photograph of a man, who he claims is involved in a forgery racket downtown. Childan IDs the man who came to his store. The name on the photo is Frank Fink. Childan signs a document testifying the man in the photo is the one who tried to swindle him. Childan thinks about how he needs a copy of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy for himself, and how he exists in a world of order thanks to the Reich.

Summary: Chapter 8

Freiherr Hugo Reiss, the Reich’s Consul in San Francisco meets with Kreuz vom Meere, chief of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the German intelligence agency. The relationship between the two men is strained because their jurisdiction overlaps in several areas. Reiss is technically Vom Meere’s subordinate by way of an honorary title, a deliberate move by the Reich, he suspects, to keep the men off-balance. Vom Meere asks Reiss about a German intelligence agent, but Reiss replies there are several on the Pacific coast at the moment, and isn’t sure which one he’s referring to. Von Meere clarifies it is Rudolf Wegener and his whereabouts need to be reported to the SD immediately.

One of Reiss’ employees, Pferdehuf, comes into his office claiming that a retired Japanese general, Tedeki, is making his way to the coast incognito. Reiss conjectures that the man is probably coming to receive medical care since it’s superior in the States. Reiss, uninterested in the matter, but not wanting to provoke his superiors, instructs Pferdehuf to tell the authorities in Berlin that Tedeki has already arrived and it’s too late to intercept him. Reiss goes back to reading his book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Reiss is appalled and enraged at the novel’s life-like depiction of Hitler’s funeral and the fall of Berlin and becomes deeply unsettled. He thinks more should be done to suppress the book and dreams of sending an assassin to kill its author.

Analysis: Chapters 7 & 8

In Chapters 7 and 8, one of the central themes of the book—history, as an idea or concept, and its relationship to reality—begins to take shape. This comes by way of the novel-within-the-novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Popular in the Japanese Pacific States, the book is banned in German-controlled areas. It’s legal in the independent Rocky Mountain States, but people are indifferent to the book there. In that politically-neutral zone, they already live an alternate reality in that they are forgotten, politically insignificant, and outside of history, so to speak. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy appears in the hands of almost every character in the book at some point, forming a recurring motif that Dick uses in the novel to explore the idea of history.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is written by Hawthorne Abendsen, the man referred to in the title of Dick’s novel. He is the man in the castle as he’s rumored to live in a secluded and well-fortified home near Cheyenne to protect himself from the many who want to attack him for his controversial book. Abendsen’s novel details an alternate history of World War II, where Britain and the United States won. Yet even in Abendsen’s novel, which tells a story closer to what readers know actually happened after World War II, some things in it are not true. In Abendsen’s novel, the United States defeats communism in China, and Britain becomes their racially driven opponent, which did not happen in real life. Such a discrepancy suggests that it may never be possible to record a form of history that is one hundred percent factual. History might be something else entirely, such as a series of perspectives assembled and taken apart, over and over.

Dick uses the characters themselves to explore this idea even further. As the theme of history is a concept that might never be recorded accurately takes shape with the appearance of Abendsen’s novel, the characters continue to show how things are often not what they seem, and how difficult it is to tell between authentic and fake. The characters themselves are growing more and more unreal. Childan tries desperately to pose as a civilized, cultured white American at the Kasouras’ house, answering questions correctly and trying frantically to avoid a faux pas. Alternatively, the Kasouras, to him, appear as imposters, copying musical and artistic tastes fed to them by the culture at large, and eating and drinking from British- and American-made silverware and cups. None of these characters are acting truthfully towards each other. It’s all pretense.

Additionally, Reiss is warned about a Japanese general traveling to the United States incognito and a certain German intelligence agent who might have gone rogue. Childan is shown a photo of Frank Frink, who he realizes was masquerading as the Admiral who tried to buy 12 pistols from his store. If history is hard to pin down, perhaps it is because people themselves, who are ultimately the producers and recorders of history, are unstable themselves. Philip K. Dick shows through the characters how humans are, in essence, multi-faceted entities with different desires, impulses, and ulterior motives.

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