Ubik

Money provides a host of symbols that one could read and dissect to understand a culture and its values. In the novel, currency shifts and evolves, and we can see how American culture’s figureheads shift and evolve over time, as well. The final scene of the novel, in which it is Joe Chip’s face on the coin that Runciter holds, symbolizes, perhaps, that the more things change, the more they stay the same; while the faces on the coins change, their purpose—capitalism actualized—does not. 

Death is a motif that is explored throughout the novel through the system of half-life. We see the problems that arise for those stuck in half-life with Jory, who exploits their remaining consciousness for his own benefit. Many of the characters in the novel question whether the extension of life is a good thing or a bad thing. The novel might suggest that humanity’s obsession with extending the length of our lives will separate us from a true sense of what it means to die. At the same time, those who exist in half-life are also not truly alive, and seem to exist, instead, in a sort of liminal state, separate from the “real” world and, in many cases, waiting to die a second time.