Phillips Dick’s remarkably malleable novel, Ubilk, follows the experiences of Joe Chip in the distant future. A technician working for the Runcitar company, Chip begins to experience changes in reality after a member of a rival company attempts to assassinate him. By portraying Chip’s experiences, Dick argues that the perceived reality is at once real and fabricated. By extension, Dick reveals that no fixed connection between the individual and reality exists. Every individual’s conception of reality is subjective, and this conception cannot be used to determine a fixed relationship. 

Perhaps nothing encapsulates this fluidity better than the temporariness that Chip harbors. As noted, “he felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.” The connection between the individual and reality lapses; both exist as distinct and fluid entities. The individual can interpret reality, but any interpretation would be subjective and thus cannot determine reality as a fixed entity. If reality is fluid, the identity of the individual is also fluid. The ending of the novel also speaks to the malleability of reality. By the end of the novel, Glen Runciter discovers a Joe Chip coin in his pocket. This raises many questions about its implication. Is it suggesting that Runciter is dead? If so, does this extend to implying that Joe Chip and others are alive? Ultimately, neither could be true. As Dick’s former wife Tessa Dick remarks in her interpretation of the novel, “we can't be sure of anything in the world that we call 'reality.'” Joe Chip may be dead and living in a state of halfway. Or he may be fully alive and live in a dream, and so everything in his narrative is purely conjured by his imagination. Dick wants to tell us that reality is not a fixed identity. Instead, it is open to interpretation. 

The incoherency of the novel speaks to the malleability of reality. The reality of half-life, according to Runciter, proceeds in the following way: “an ability somehow connected with time reversion; not strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time … for instance, [Ella, Runciter’s wife] can't go into the past either; what [Ella] does, as near as I can comprehend it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter.” While interpretation of this quote extends beyond a mere description of half-life, the quote nevertheless renders a subjective insight into a version of the perceived reality of half-life. Opposing explanations arise as Chip and others proceed in a confusing state after the assisination attempt. As Stanislaw Lem points out in his interpretation of the novel, “Might not one of these people dream that he is alive and well and that from his accustomed world he is communicating with the other one – that only the other person succumbed to the unfortunate mishap?” Lem points that it is possible that Chip might still be alive in reality. However, there is yet another possible explanation that upsets the previous one: “certain perturbations may affect the subjective world of the frozen sleeper, to whom it will then seem that his environment is going mad – perhaps that in it even time is falling to pieces” The reality to Chip may be subjective. To him, his reality may be shattering. It is perhaps impossible to find coherency in Ubik. In the novel, the answer to the seemingly simple question -- what is reality -- is riddled with various interpretations. Reality is at once real, because it exists and is perceptible, and fabricated because it is open to interpretation. The identity of the individual, similarly, is blurred by an ambiguous relationship with reality.  

The novel also evokes reflection upon the values of contemporary society. As science fiction, Ubik projects an outlook for the future, future as in the context of 20th century America. Dick argues that the future is entangled in the pursuit of meaning in life. If pleasure is the ultimate goal of life, anything by extension that revokes that result is avoided. Death, therefore, becomes the most avoided. Is the fear of death the propelling force behind each action? Is the extension of life the ultimate goal of life? In Ubik, the state of half-life achieves this extension. Death is reversed. But does this achieve pleasure? Does this achieve the ultimate goal of life? Dick argues otherwise. Crime and corruption permeate every facet of the imaginary society depicted in Ubik. Individual wants meet with rival interests, culminating in distrust and even open conflict. 

Ubik may seem incoherent in its narrative, but it is in this incoherence lies the crux of Dick's message. Dick's work is remarkable because it asks the critical question of the relationship between an individual and reality, and by extension, the individual's pursuit of meaning in its perception of reality.