[Ubik]

Can someone please explain the ending of Ubik (by Philip K Dick) to me? Or is it just supposed to not make sense and leave the reader thinking like Man in the High Castle? I loved the story, but I'd like to understand the significance of the ending.

Thanks.

[Rasputin]

Wellcome to the world of PKD:)

I've read a small part of a PKD interview in which he said that he wrote UBIK only till page 12. The rest of the book was written automatically because he had writer's block. In my opinion I would intepret the ending as an open ending, or even a question. During the book, if you take Runciter's perspective, he was the survivor of the explostion, trying to contact Joe and the gang, by sending coins with his portrait on them. At the end there's a role reversal: when Runciter discoveres that he, in fact, might be the one who died while Joe's trying to contact him. That's my 2 Runciter coins (;)) on the matter anyway.

If you shall ask- so how's that girl Sam is connected, or runciter's wife and the whole Tibetian Book of The Dead thing? I got no clue.

I liked the solipsism reference though when they got to a store, and there was an old-lady wearing blue-berry colored clothes. They spoke about whther she's in fact real, and how she would feel if she discovered that she doesn't exist...

In my opinion, take PD's stuff easy. I know that there are many 'philosophers' and academic people who really like digging weird stuff from his fiction. I treat it as a good, weird entertainment. If it has any other value, it probably went along with its fantastic author- to the grave.
Yesterday I got his collected stories and biography by the way. Really interesting.

[JunkMonkey]

In my opinion, take PD's stuff easy. I know that there are many 'philosophers' and academic people who really like digging weird stuff from his fiction. I treat it as a good, weird entertainment. If it has any other value, it probably went along with its fantastic author- to the grave.


I'd second that. Just go along for the ride. A novel is a piece of art. Let it affect you as a piece of art. Don't analyse it to bits. I've often come away from PKD's books (just as I often come away from other things, David Lynch's movies for example) thinking: What the **** was all that about? And the answer usually is: I don't rightly know but I know I'm different for having experienced it.

[Rasputin]

I really got to let something off my chest here. Here, in a typical Israeli high-school, our literature classes consists of nothing more then memorizing pages on pages of summaries. Sometimes tons of pages just for a 5 line poem. A lot of those intepretations are rather odd, and don't make a lot of sense. This made me feel that whatever I read, I probably miss a lot of "THE message". Solaris, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The philosophy of Lovecraft... All three (and more) cause me a frantic journey through google, searching for THE authorized interpretation. The fact that Lovecraft and Dick became such a popular objects of literary criticism makes me a bit dipressed, knowing that no matter how many interviews of Dick I'll read, or how many biographies of Lovecraft I shall devour, there still would be this voice telling me that I totally missed on something like the "structualist-post-modern-Baudrillarian message in the Cthulhu mythos"- something which I don't even care about!
For all of those people who feel the same (I doubt that there are more mentaly disturbed folks such as I, though) I present to you this (http://fandumb.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/blade-runners-hong-kong-or-academics-are-dopey/).
Sometimes I think that it would be better to abolish all of those disciplines like cultural studies and the whole post-modern philosophy crap just so I would feel better about myself:)

[JunkMonkey]

Whenever I feel like this I just generate a few pages of Post Modern Bullshit using the Post-Modernist Bullshit generator Here (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/) and suddenly start to feel a lot better about myself.

"If one examines the neosemanticist paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either reject capitalist desemioticism or conclude that language may be used to disempower the Other. If Sontagist camp holds, we have to choose between Lacanist obscurity and neocultural construction. But the subject is contextualised into a that includes culture as a paradox."

[cougs]

In UBIK the combination of Pat Conley with her strange ability to affect time and reality, the idea of "half-life", and the shifts of realities when a different characters POV is observed make it a pretty confusing ending.

Who is in half-life? did Pat change reality on purpose? by accident? How can they tell? what is UBIK? I thought i had it figured out, Runciter must be alive, and then Runciter finds coins with Chip's face on them!

PKD loves that whole confusion of reality theme, makes for a great ending, seeing as I go on thinking about the book for days.

[ArthurFrayn]

The fact that Lovecraft and Dick became such a popular objects of literary criticism makes me a bit dipressed, knowing that no matter how many interviews of Dick I'll read, or how many biographies of Lovecraft I shall devour, there still would be this voice telling me that I totally missed on something like the "structualist-post-modern-Baudrillarian message in the Cthulhu mythos"- something which I don't even care about!

How bad do you feel about not being able to shred on the guitar? You know that if you devoted the time to it, while you may not end up playing as good as Yngwie Malmsteen or John Petrucci you'd at least have a better understanding of what they're doing, right?

This is just academic riffing we're talking about. The key is to dicipher what's in the original text based on what you think was the influence and knowledge that the author worked with. The other stuff is just putting it in an academic critical context that may or may not be of any use to you whatsoever.

[Rasputin]

@JunkMonkey: Yeah, this generator indeed makes you feel liberated from this intellectual burden. Sometimes I wonder why do they write like that? I know that some of them were accused by others of being vague on purpose, so I know it's not my lack of academic background that hinders my efforts at decyphering their writings. I know from a wikipedia article that Slavoj Zizek wrote about PKD stories and The Matrix, but I found it extremely hard to follow. Damn continental philosophy.
I found another cure for this feeling. Reading. A PKD interview, a story or just a remark is worth about 6^6^6 words of literary criticism :)

@Arthur, you won't believe, but that was exactly why I stopped playing guitar a couple of years ago. I stopped enjoying it. I felt that each time I pick my axe, I'm INDEED picking up an axe for a battle. Against my mediocre playing, against Malmsteen or I don't know who or what.

Nowdays I think about picking up juggling balls for the sake of fun only, this time.