43 pages • 1 hour read
Philip K. DickA Scanner Darkly
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
In 1994 Los Angeles, in a subdivision of plastic tract housing, Jerry Fabin imagines his house, body, and dog are infested with aphids, and nothing will get rid of them. They are spread, he believes, by “Carrier-people,” human hosts who carry them into his home. When his friend, Charles Freck, visits, they go through the motions of filling jars with the largest aphids for further study.
Freck phones his drug dealer looking for “slow death” (Substance D), but his dealer is out. He fears a massive shortage of the drug. He sees a police cruiser behind him and immediately concocts a cover story so the police won’t know he’s high, but the cops, oblivious to the sight of one more person with a substance addiction, take no notice.
Freck pulls up to a mall—walled and guarded—and decides to score some slow death at night when no one is around. He sits in his car watching the pedestrian traffic when he spots a familiar face—Donna, a dealer he’s met once before. He follows her, but when he approaches, calling her by name, she insists she doesn’t know him. She brandishes a small knife, and he backs away. A moment later, she stops and looks back, and he recalls her doling out small capsules of the drug. Now she remembers him. They walk back to his car, and he asks her for some tabs, but supply is short. She can get them in a day or two, but, for Freck, that’s a long wait. Still, two weeks supply (120 tabs) feels like blissful eternity.
Fabin is now being held in a “Federal Clinic,” where he suffers from brain damage resulting from excessive use of Substance D. Freck notices his own shakiness, an early sign of withdrawal.
Chapter 2 Summary
Undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor addresses the Orange County Lion’s Club. He assures them he is working tirelessly to rid the streets of the “’brain-destructive filth’” (18) being peddled to their children every day. Privately, however, he despises these people—“straights”—who live in gated communities and look upon people with addictions as predators to be shot. When he deviates from his prepared speech, his supervisor, listening over a remote monitor, urges him to return to the script. After detailing the effects of Substance D and a brief plea for empathy for people with addiction, he abruptly ends his speech.
Later, Arctor roams the endless, “plastic” landscape of Anaheim, CA. He considers making a purchase from Donna as part of an ongoing attempt to identify the more prominent sources. Small-time dealers like Donna are generally not arrested. The working theory is that Substance D is produced in a single lab and distributed through a complex network of local dealers. Failure to locate such a massive facility suggests that federal law enforcement may be involved. He calls Donna and requests 1,000 tabs of Substance D, and they arrange for a drop-off. Arctor’s next stop is “New-Path,” a rehab clinic.
Chapter 3 Summary
Sitting with his friend Jim Barris (also Arctor’s roommate), Freck considers checking into a New Path clinic, but their cold turkey approach makes him uneasy. Freck and Barris discuss the physical effects of withdrawal (as well as Barris’s claim that he can derive a gram of high-quality cocaine from $1 worth of ingredients). To prove his point, they buy a can of sunscreen and drive to Arctor’s house. He begins the “extraction” process, and Freck wonders if he can barter with Donna—a gram of coke for sex. While the sunscreen components separate, Barris examines Arctor’s damaged cephalochromoscope. Barris plans to write a book detailing how to manufacture drugs legally in one’s own kitchen.
Arctor investigates a New-Path center looking for Doug Weeks, a high-profile drug runner. Posing as an addict seeking treatment, Arctor checks himself into the rehab facility, but the staff won’t tell him if Weeks is a patient there. He eventually leaves, hoping for a reassignment.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Dick’s world—Southern California, 1994 from the perspective of Dick’s writing in the mid-1970s—is a homogenous landscape of strip malls, convenience stores, and fast-food chains, laying the foundation for the theme of Institutional Corruption, as the physical environment reflects the depersonalization of standardized solutions. It is a dichotomous environment, divided between those who habitually use drugs and their “straight,” middle-class counterparts. Dick focuses much of his perspective (and empathy) on the former—users of the powerful Substance D, a synthetic narcotic that causes irreparable brain damage. The implicit voices of the narrative—primarily Charles Freck and Bob Arctor—are both pleas for understanding and treatment over incarceration for people with substance addictions. Freck frantically seeks his next fix, but at the same time he wants to be free of the drug’s grip over him. Dick never blames the user for this predicament. Instead, he portrays a world in which “dopers” become trapped by casual experimentation into a life of dependence.
Similarly, narcotics agent Arctor, a reluctant part of the law enforcement establishment, sees the futility of prosecuting those with addictions, advocating sympathy instead. When he addresses an audience of “straights” (middle-class suburbanites), he deviates from his script to suggest that users are victims rather than “animals.” Dick, himself a participant in the 1970s California drug subculture, portrays law enforcement as hell-bent on sweeping the streets clean of those who have addictions, committed to preserving the pristine (and plastic) world of the straights. While not advocating drug usage, the narrative asks readers to see those living with addiction not as hopeless users, but as victims of a coordinated effort to flood poor urban areas with an illegal substance to which they will become addicted and for which they can be locked away.
Arctor’s role in the vast law enforcement bureaucracy muddles his own sense of self and begins to build to theme of The Illusive Nature of Personal Identity. He has one foot in the straight world and one in the doper world, and he seems confused as to where his allegiance lies. He sees the destructive effects of Substance D and wants it off the street, but the heavy-handed tactics of Drug Enforcement are hypocritical and counterproductive. By infiltrating the drug subculture, he develops relationships with these people, Donna in particular, and he sees them as flawed human beings rather than predatory criminals. His “scramble suit” (a technologically enhanced garment that renders him a blur to the naked eye) is the perfect metaphor for his identity confusion. The suit, which projects rapid-fire images of hundreds of people in mere seconds, prompts Arctor to question his role as a cog in an oppressive machine. Is he just one more face in an endless blur of bureaucratic paper pushers or does he have a unique identity? At this point, he is unsure, and Dick suggests that “The Man” is an amalgam of nameless, faceless government officials whose identities are shrouded in Secrecy and subsumed by their mission: to curtail the free-thinking, free-living dopers.
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