A Scanner Darkly

Identities in A Scanner Darkly are fluid and ever-changing. Arctor is the most pronounced example. Dick introduces him as Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent assigned to infiltrate a community of dopers, hoping they will lead him to the source of the deadly Substance D. He is Bob Arctor while living with Barris and Luckman, but when reporting to his supervisor Hank, he is “Fred.” His real identity is concealed by his scramble suit, so as far as Hank is concerned, the agent reporting to him is Fred surveilling a suspect named Arctor. Over time, however, even Arctor disassociates himself from his real identity, believing himself to be Fred and Arctor to be a third person entirely. He even assumes a third identity: Bruce, a New-Path patient. He responds to the name and refers to himself that way. For one brief scene, he is even “Pete” to a woman who can’t see past his scramble suit.

Donna is a dealer and doper until her true identity as another undercover agent is revealed. Mike is an informant for the agency masquerading as a patient. Even Barris sheds his identity briefly when he answers the phone as Arctor. While Arctor’s mercurial identities can be attributed to his overuse of Substance D and the resulting delusions, the constantly shifting identities throughout the narrative allow Dick to explore the idea of “existential detachment,” a form of psychosis he experienced himself (although not to the degree seen in the novel). Arctor, as both observer and participant in his own life begins to experience this alienation from his own sense of self, a phenomenon described in neuroscientific detail as a “competition” between the two hemispheres of his brain.

Dick was conversant in the theories and research of Roger Sperry, who discovered that severing the connection between brain hemispheres results in “dual consciousness.” Dick, in fact, even cites Sperry directly in the novel, and his work informs Dick’s descriptions of the corrosive effects of Substance D. While split-brain psychosis is more the purview of neuroscience, Dick deftly incorporates it into his near-future tale of characters adrift in a sea of lost or shifting personal identities.

A less insidious consideration of this theme is the presentation of the idea of code switching. Code switching is when we adjust parts of our personality and behavior to fit the context of our everyday lives. For example, the vocabulary and mannerisms we use to talk to authority figures is often different from the way we speak with our friends. The narrative takes the idea of code switching to an extreme in that the codes the reader sees Arctor use are separate lives with individual names, but they are ultimately all the same person. While the differences in identity are relatively normal considering the disparate contexts—as a narcotics agent, a subject of surveillance with a drug addiction, and finally as a patient at the rehab center—the drugs have made it impossible for Arctor to do any more switching. Once locked into the one identity, Arctor feels lost and largely without agency since he can no longer navigate his regular life the way he did before. This highlights the all-consuming nature of drug addiction and indicates the inability to continue living a regular life once the addiction has pushed someone beyond the control over their own mind and ability to adapt to the world around them.

The hallmark of an unreliable narrator is their secrets. When withholding the truth—or parts of it—readers are left on shaky ground, never knowing what’s real and what’s imaginary. The characters in A Scanner Darkly hold many secrets and for a variety of reasons. Donna hides her identity as an undercover agent to observe Arctor. Her emotional manipulation—befriending him but stopping short of any physical contact—leaves her feeling guilty for the man she and the agency have used. The scramble suits are a clever device for hiding identity, allowing every agent to keep their identity secret from every other agent, ostensibly for their own protection in the event the agency has been infiltrated and corrupted. Jim Barris lies about many things: damaging the cephalochromoscope, tinkering with Arctor’s car, tapping his phone calls, but most notably, he implicates Arctor in a falsified scheme to steal guns from an Air Force base. Barris’s motivation is unclear. He may suspect Arctor is an undercover agent—Arctor himself presumes as much—and he concocts the story to distract law enforcement from his own crimes, or he may simply be delusional from too much drug use, but whatever the reason, he has been secretly compiling “evidence” against Arctor for weeks behind his back. The irony is that Arctor, who seems to be the one holding the secrets, is actually being played without his knowledge. All of the secrets, revealed only near the end, are aligned against him.

Dick’s entire narrative is built on a shaky foundation. It is rife with delusional thinking, and much of the characters’ perceptions of the outside world take on a hallucinogenic quality. Barris doesn’t know if he has damaged the cephalochromoscope; Arctor isn’t sure if the excrement he smells on his car engine is real or not; Luckman imagines Fabin’s childhood with an older brother who’s really an aphid (a sly reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis perhaps). The net effect of all these deceptions is to leave readers as unsettled and unsure of the truth as the characters. By giving his audience a glimpse into the delusions and paranoia of these people, Dick allows an otherwise passive reader to experience, if only vicariously, the drug-induced psychosis that destroys Arctor, Fabin, and so many of Dick’s real-life friends.