![]() I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. Dick explained, "y wife Nancy left me in 1970. Dick said in an interview, "Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw." īetween mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid-1972, Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenage drug users at his home in Marin County, described in a letter as being located at 707 Hacienda Way, Santa Venetia. The book ends with Bruce hiding a flower in his shoe to give to his "friends"-undercover police agents posing as recovering addicts at the Santa Ana New-Path facility-on Thanksgiving.Ī Scanner Darkly is a fictionalized account of real events, based on Dick's experiences in the 1970s drug culture. ![]() Although considered by his handlers to be nothing more than a walking shell of a man, "Bruce" manages to spot rows of blue flowers growing hidden among rows of corn and realizes that the blue flowers are Mors ontologica, the source of Substance D. The story ends with Bruce working at a New-Path farming commune, where he is experiencing a serious neurocognitive deficit, after withdrawing from Substance D. As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed "Bruce" and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games, intended to break the will of the patients. Without his knowledge, Arctor has been selected to penetrate the organization. It is revealed that Donna has been a narcotics agent all along, working as part of a police operation to infiltrate New-Path and determine its funding source. They do not know his identity because he wears the scramble suit, but when his police supervisor suggests to him that he might be Bob Arctor, he is confused and thinks it cannot be possible.ĭonna takes Arctor to "New-Path", a rehabilitation clinic, just as Arctor begins to experience the symptoms of Substance D withdrawal. Through a series of drug and psychological tests, Arctor's superiors at work discover that his addiction has made him incapable of performing his job as a narcotics agent. ![]() When Arctor sees himself in the videos saved by the scanners, he does not realize that it is him. ![]() Arctor's use of the drug causes the two hemispheres of his brain to function independently or "compete". Then he is able to sit in a police facility and observe his housemates through "holo-scanners", audio-visual surveillance devices that are placed throughout the house. When performing his work as an undercover agent, Arctor goes by the name "Fred" and wears a "scramble suit" that conceals his identity from other officers. A conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer, through whom he intends to identify high-level dealers of Substance D. (The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book.) While posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to "Substance D" (also referred to as "Slow Death", "Death" or "D"), a powerful psychoactive drug. Arctor shields his identity from those in the drug subculture and from the police. The protagonist is Bob Arctor, member of a household of drug users, who is also living a double life as an undercover police agent assigned to spy on Arctor's household. The novel is one of Dick's best-known works and served as the basis for a 2006 film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater. The semi- autobiographical story is set in a dystopian Orange County, California, in the then-future of June 1994, and includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use (both recreational and abusive). A Scanner Darkly is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K.
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