22 pages • 44 minutes read
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
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Symbols & Motifs
Mars
Referenced frequently but never portrayed, Mars takes on a symbolic meaning for the story’s protagonist. To dull office clerk Quail, Mars represents adventure and escape, a place offering a deliberate contrast to Earth. Quail dreams about Mars and wants to visit the planet because he is not satisfied with his life. He covets Mars not as a destination or a physical place, but an idea that he believes can liberate him from his mundane existence.
As Quail changes when he recovers memories or is in the throes of memory implant delusions, the symbolic meaning of Mars also changes. When Quail is a spy, Mars is no longer a distant dream. Instead, it is the site of an assassination on behalf of Interplan—Quail knows that if he were ever to return to Mars, he would be killed by the locals in revenge. Mars is now a dangerous place for dangerous people like Quail: still a potent vision of romantic adventure, but now one tempered by the newfound violence bubbling around Quail.
Eventually, Mars becomes an afterthought. In Quail’s third transformation, the threat of politics on Mars is dismissed in favor of a villain out of a child’s fantasy: Aliens eager to kill every human kept at bay by Quail’s virtues. In this simpler version of the world, Mars and its complexities is irrelevant: It becomes a symbol of the petty squabbles of people who must instead come together to rally around Quail.
The Aliens
Quail’s final revelation in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is a child’s fairy tale: Small aliens arrived on Earth, intending to wipe out humanity, but after detecting the sincere goodness of young Quail, they agreed not to destroy humanity so long as Quail is alive. Quail makes it clear that there is no going around him in this version of reality: The aliens’ technology is vastly more advanced, so keeping Quail alive really is the only way to stop the invasion.
The sketchily defined and purposefully unrealistic-sounding aliens are Dick’s nod to a well-worn trope of the science fiction genre: The humans, usually overly focused on petty disputes, such as the political conflict between Earth and Mars, must come together to prepare for a genuine external threat. At the same time, the aliens symbolize Quail’s infantile regression. After cycling through identities, he has arrived at the most childlike one: A young boy who protects the Earth through empathy and thus becomes the most important and most lauded person in the world.
Because of these dual functions, the aliens don’t stand up to much realistic scrutiny. They are eager to wipe out all humans, despite the fact that they clearly have moral codes similar to our own (otherwise, why would they care about Quail’s empathy?). They are both viciously murderous and at the same time so altruistic that they can be a moral lesson to us terrible humans. They have technology humans can never hope to match but are physically tiny (both qualities have the whiff of a young imagination, making the aliens not threatening to little Quail in person, but powerful enough to cement his standing as the world’s greatest human being in the abstract). The fantasy of the aliens contrasts with the fantasy of being an Interplan secret assassin: While the aliens met Quail and saw that his goodness justified the survival of humanity, Interplan sought out Quail and saw his capacity for violence.
Martian Fauna
Quail is fascinated by Martian flora and fauna, which are an important symbol of his relationship with the distant planet. Quail wants to understand the unknown; his sense of adventure compels his to travel to Mars. Quail interprets his desire to go to Mars as a desire to be important and as a yearning for adventure. However, there is a subtext to Quail’s interest in Martian flora and fauna: Something is not right in his life and he needs to understand why.
In a park, Quail feels a connection to Martian birds, which can survive in Earth’s atmosphere, but are burdened by the increased gravity. Quail also feels burdened by his existence on Earth, and the soaring birds represent his desire for freedom.
After visiting Rekal, Quail finds a collection of desiccated Martian worms in a box beside his desk, fauna he believes he smuggled back after his assassination mission. At Rekal, McClane told Quail that Rekal plants corroborating evidence of the fake trips they sell—and now, Quail’s box provides external confirmation that Quail’s memories of his trip to Mars are real (or “real”). The dead worms are also symbols of the violent conflict between Earth and Mars, one involving assassinating a politician. The Martian fauna could not survive on Earth, so they withered and died. Similarly, Quail can no longer exist on Mars: He will be killed if he returns.
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By Philip K. Dick
