We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is the story of Douglas Quail’s struggle to reckon with a major disruption to his identity. After a reality-twisting revelation, he must reconsider who he assumes himself to be and what it means to be Douglas Quail. What makes Quail’s transformation all the more hard to process is that they are not the result of organic personal growth or forward movement. Instead, each of Quail’s new identities is an ostensibly older identity from his past. This means Quail’s character progression is actually regression—rather than changing into a new version of himself in the present/future, he must come to terms with a forgotten past, which can’t help but reorient who he is in the present.

Quail’s regressive development has four stages. He begins the story as a dull, boring, and passive office clerk. After his trip to Rekal, he seems to remember a past as an active, interesting, and dangerous skilled assassin. After bargaining with the Interplan agents, Quail agrees to confess his deepest fantasies to them, revealing an arrogant and narcissistic desire to be the most important person on earth. Then, this fantastical status is also ostensibly revealed to be true, and Quail receives a justification for once again becoming passive. As a protector of the Earth who must only live to fulfill his function, Quail combines the passivity of his office clerk identity and the agency of his assassin identity with a unique self-importance. Quail’s final form is a complete regression to his childhood, when the desire to be the most important person in the world is still developmentally acceptable.

At the same time, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale also portrays a crisis of reality. In the context of the story, objective truth does not exist—we can never be sure whose version of Quail is the real one. Because Dick alternates between spoken dialog and internal thoughts, but characters seem to respond to each other’s unspoken words, readers are experiencing not just one unreliable narrator—but a story full of unreliable characters. In one possible reading of the story, everything that happens after Quail gets to Rekal the first time is a figment of his imagination because Dick sets up the story to make sense as Quail’s Rekal-induced fever dream, complete with the corroborating evidence that Rekal promised to plant in his apartment (even the last pieces of evidence, the magic wand and the letter from the UN, are something McClane orders to “be taken to Quail’s conapt” (16). Conversely, it’s possible that Quail really isn’t just a typical office clerk who dreams of being a spy, but indeed the only person alive capable of protecting the Earth from tiny aliens who threaten humanity.

Reality is based on available facts, but when these facts are undermined, changed, or proven to be false with the frequency they are in this story,  reality becomes a purely subjective experience based on available information, in which a character’s sincere belief in any reality must correspond to their lived experiences and memories. This theme recurs frequently in Dick’s fiction. In this story, characters can only function when they can agree on a common reality. They try to find it by peeling back and erasing Quail’s memories. But the more they tinker, the less they can trust their own experiences or the experiences of others. Reality becomes a fickle, subjective force which holds them all captive.

The story’s final twist—the tiny aliens bent on eradicating humanity—resolves nothing. Either they are real, in which case Dick has written a common sci fi trope: The petty infighting of humans (in this case, Interplan’s interventions in the political situation of Mars) pale in comparison to a bigger, humanity-unifying foe. Or, they are the final delusion Quail experiences after hallucinating being a top-level assassin is not enough to fulfill his narcissistic desires. In this case, Dick has written a darkly cynical take on the ways we use stories as escapist attempts to escape difficult reality in favor of comforting illusions. Is Quail an everyman who turns out to be the special, destined, unique hero—or does Dick want readers to question this clichéd approach to science fiction stories by creating a character who pitifully clings to increasingly less likely delusions rather than accept his humdrum life? That’s for readers to decide.