/ Time Out of Joint - Philip K. Dick

Published in 1959, Time Out of Joint is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The protagonist is Ragle Gumm, a man who lives with his sister Margo’s family and makes a living by answering a daily quiz called “Where Will the Little Green Man Appear?” published in a newspaper. The game consists of a large grid where Ragle have to guess in which square the little green man will appear in each day. Ragle is the undisputed champion of the contest, an extraordinary result achieved thanks to his ability to quickly identify patterns that lead him to the solution.

The mystery in the novel begins when Vic, the husband of Ragle’s sister Margo, goes to the bathroom in his house during a poker game and tries to pull a chain hanging from the ceiling to turn on the light. He discovers that the chain does not exist but that there is a switch on the wall to turn on the light. From this event, the reality in which the novel is set begins to falter, raising doubts among the characters, who continue the story in a climax of shocking revelations.

Following Philip Dick’s narrative style, the characters are minimally characterized, the setting is a 1950s American town, and the protagonists are fearful of the threats of those years, such as the atomic conflict. The entire story serves as a backdrop for the science fiction theater that Dick stages, creating a suspense that keeps readers glued to the pages.

One last curiosity is that the plot of The Truman Show, a 1998 film, was inspired by the novel. But in the book case, it’s not about a TV show.

Spoilers ahead.

The references in this story are diverse. Dick tried a new formula for the novel’s plot, compared to his previous works: everyone knows except the protagonist. In fact, more than halfway through the work, it becomes apparent that the reality constructed around Ragle’s life is fictitious. When he escapes from the town, the protagonist discovers he is more famous than he thought, even though he doubted himself because, still unmarried, he lived at his sister’s house. Ragle, by solving the green man competition in a newspaper, is the one who helps discover where the enemy missiles will fall. Unknowingly, he is an essential part of the defense project, and the government uses his sophisticated analyses to protect the planet. What Ragle does in life is extremely useful to humanity, engaged in an interplanetary war, only he couldn’t realize it before.

Thanks to the biography of Philip Dick curated by Emmanuel Carrère titled I Am Alive and You Are Dead, we discover that Ragle is actually Dick’s alter ego, who spent his days writing science fiction books for children to barely make a living, instead of dedicating himself to greater works he hoped to write one day. Ragle dedicates himself to finding the position of the green man, and the green men were precisely the beings that appeared in the science fiction booklets published in the 1950s, considered minor literature at the time, not worthy of standalone volumes. Ragle solves competitions about green men, Dick writes stories about green men; both follow a passion instead of engaging in real work like responsible adults as society wants them to.

The episode of the cord, mentioned above, is a real event in Dick’s life. As his biographer Carrère says, while normal people when something unexpected happens say: “How strange,” and don’t think about it anymore, Dick kept thinking about it and wondering if there were any hidden meanings. The chain he remembered being in the bathroom could have been some part of his memory that was compromised, a past memory that, for some reason, now reappeared; a glitch in reality, we would say today.

What matters to us is that Dick did an extraordinary job of writing down these delusional obsessions that made him famous. Whether he was right or wrong, we still cannot know with absolute certainty; maybe we are really living in a simulation. Dick always thought of himself as a “chosen one”, someone who saw reality differently, and had the need to communicate it to us. He, unlike Ragle, knew, while everyone else was in the dark.