43 pages • 1 hour read
A Scanner Darkly
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Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Barris and Arctor try to repair Arctor’s car, but Barris and Luckman argue. Freck finds the atmosphere too tense and decides to leave. As he drives, he thinks about musical artists of the recent generation—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Croce—and wonders if their deaths presage the dawning of a darker era.
Sitting in Arctor’s living room, Luckman tells a story about Donna stealing 18,000 stamps from a malfunctioning postal machine and then reselling them for a profit. The story makes Arctor wonder if Donna has a deceptive and “freaky” side. When he asks to borrow Barris’s car to “score some beans” (106), Barris tells him his car is too modified for Arctor to handle. As a law enforcement officer, however, Arctor’s car has some modifications of its own: a device that can tell him if another police vehicle is near; a police scanner that sounds to the untrained ear like radio static; a transmitter built into his radio that covertly broadcasts all conversation within the car to the authorities. While relatively sophisticated, these modifications are not beyond the skill of “millions of car freaks” (108) who could similarly modify their own vehicles, giving them a decided advantage over the police. Without Barris’s car, Arctor decides to walk to Donna’s, stopping first at the surveillance hub.
Arctor—as Fred—watches the feed from the holo-scanners. He sees Barris constructing a hash pipe while Luckman eats dinner. Luckman, however, suddenly starts choking on his food. He tries desperately to get Barris’s attention, but Barris remains focused on his pipe. Luckman collapses, but Barris doesn’t—or chooses not to—notice. When he eventually finds Luckman on the floor, Barris reacts with shock (although Arctor believes it’s feigned) and calls paramedics. Just then, Luckman regains consciousness and coughs up the food.
Donna drives by Arctor and picks him up. She reports that she has his 1,000 tabs of Substance D, as requested, and then she invites him to a drive-in movie (all “11” Planet of the Apes movies running consecutively). She drives to her apartment, and Arctor pays her for the drugs. She recounts several incidents of theft she’s committed, but Arctor knows he will never turn her in. He can’t bear the thought of her enduring withdrawal alone and in prison. She lights up a hash pipe, and they smoke together, the closest thing to intimacy Arctor can hope for.
Chapter 9 Summary
Stoned on hash, Arctor asks Donna if he can hug her, but she refuses, telling him he’s “too ugly.” Hurt and angered, he storms out. Donna follows and apologizes. Calmer now, he walks with her back to her apartment. She admits she’s addicted to drugs and doesn’t expect to live long. She does, however, believe she will meet “Mr. Right,” and he will buy her a house in Oregon. He asks if he can come with her, but she politely declines.
That night, he brings home Connie, a “needle freak,” who agrees to have sex in exchange for “ten mex hits” (123). Afterward, they sleep, and for a moment, Arctor imagines Connie is really Donna.
Chapter 10 Summary
Barris acquires some psychedelic mushrooms and tries to sell them. Arctor, watching the episode on the holo-scanner replay, worries that Barris may be peddling toxic mushrooms. He then observes himself coming home after his disappointing evening with Donna and stashing the tabs of Substance D under his bed. He forwards through the replay and sees Barris answering a phone call, pretending to be him. The caller asks about a bad check Arctor wrote, and Barris tells him he has no intention of paying it and hangs up. The caller is a locksmith, and Arctor theorizes that Barris had a duplicate key made and paid with a check from Arctor’s inactive account. Worse, Barris implicates Arctor as a heavy user to a man who has threatened to take the case to the district attorney: “Barris had set Bob Arctor up for a fire bombing” (131). He wonders what vendetta Barris has against him. In a paranoid spiral, he fears he will be framed as a top-level dealer and assassinated by covert operatives. He considers killing Barris himself before Luckman or Donna consumes one of his toxic mushrooms.
He clears his head of homicidal thoughts and focuses on the holo-scanner showing nighttime images of himself asleep with Connie, and for a moment, once again, he imagines Connie is Donna. Upon closer examination, the image appears to be both women simultaneously, and he suspects someone has tampered with the video.
Chapter 11 Summary
The next day, Arctor goes to the locksmith and pays off his debt. He examines the bad check and believes that Barris has forged his signature. On second thought, however, he vaguely remembers writing the check himself. When he verifies the job with the locksmith, he confirms the key was made not for his house but for his car while parked at the site of a huge drug party. He even considers the possibility that Barris may have been covering for previous mistakes. Arctor’s memory lapses evoke fear he may be on a path to addiction and, ultimately, a federal rehab clinic. He wonders why the department is focusing on him specifically as a suspect, and he resolves to be patient, to keep watching the holo-scanners in search of clues. He arrives home and is acutely aware of the scanners observing his every move. He begins to imagine the scanners as malevolent sentient beings who see into his soul.
Meanwhile, Freck, depressed and lonely, decides to kill himself. He swallows a handful of “reds” chased with a bottle of wine but soon realizes the pills are not barbiturates but psychedelics. He spends the next several hours hallucinating about a multi-eyed creature reading to him a list of his sins.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
In these chapters, Arctor begins a slow descent into drug-induced paranoia, which complicates the theme of The Nature of Reality. He questions everything he has come to trust thus far: his roommates, Donna, but mostly, himself. The disconnect between Fred the undercover agent and Arctor the surveilled suspect widens even to the point where he refers to himself in the third person, further highlighting the theme of The Illusive Nature of Personal Identity. “What if Arctor wrote this [the bad check]?” (141). The schism in his personal identity may be a result of too much Substance D, the stress of his job, or both, but whatever the cause, Fred and Arctor drift further and further apart until the actions of one have no bearing on the actions of the other.
His paranoia extends not only to his alter ego but also to Barris. Convinced that Barris wrote the bad check, his mind latches on to one delusion after another: Barris has a vendetta against him; Barris is trying to kill his roommates with toxic mushrooms; Barris could easily kill Donna, in which case he would kill Barris himself. These delusions are the result of a serious drug dependency and emblematic of how everything in his life—relationships, self-identity, his sense of reality—is filtered through a drug-addled haze. Dick captures the desperation and the fear of a life spent drifting from one fix to the next with no understanding of how to function in society. They blithely talk of stealing with no consideration of the consequences. Connie sells sex in exchange for a hit of just about anything. The ethos of the drug community—if there is one—seems to be anti-establishment in one form or another. “The Man” is an oppressor and therefore stealing from him (whomever “he” may be) is not only justified but a moral requirement.
This haphazard existence is reflected in the frenetic and disjointed dialogue. While repairing Arctor’s car, Barris and Luckman transition wildly from the advantages of four-barrel carburetors to a theoretical discussion of how many passengers would be required to give the car enough physical momentum to pass a semi (and would sandbags in the trunk be an acceptable substitute). What begins as Donna’s admittance of theft from a Coke delivery truck devolves into an arbitrary discussion of bottle caps, cassettes, and “gummed-on price stickers” (117). And all the while, Arctor’s interior monologue spins equally out of control, fantasizing about hugging Donna, about protecting her, or about moving with her to Oregon. The reality of these characters is fractured and illusory, a reality to which they have become so accustomed it feels just as real to them as conformity feels to the straights.
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By Philip K. Dick
