The Man In The High Castle

Paul and Betty invite Childan to their home. The invitation means a great deal to Childan because he is desperate to be accepted by the middle-class Japanese customers from his store. He obsesses over every detail of the invitation, ensuring that he has the perfect gift and that his mannerisms and behavior adhere to the strict protocols of Japanese formal society. Childan's obsessive adherence to these protocols reveals his deep insecurity. He is a mean-spirited, racist man who dislikes the Japanese but also cannot help but admire them. He feels inferior to them because he lives in a society where they have all the power. Childan, craving a modicum of this power and respectability, envies the Japanese, and his envy manifests as a cloying obeisance. He performs a pantomime demonstration of Japanese culture, adopting a fake persona to mask his envy and his loathing. Any extended version of this performance falls apart because Childan is not sincerely invested in this identity. He cannot maintain the performance, so he becomes anxious that he has offended his hosts. The more anxious he becomes, the more he exaggerates his interpretation of Japanese society. He changes his speech patterns, his behavior, and his beliefs in a desperate bid to win the respect of the Japanese couple. Childan cuts a pathetic figure, as he spends his life frantically trying to win the admiration of a people he hates and unwittingly mocks. 

Reiss is introduced to The Man in the High Castle as a further illustration of the nature of subjectivity. For the first time, the audience views events from the perspective of a high-ranking Nazi official. Similar events and items are discussed but from a different perspective. To this end, Reiss's perspective is another subjective reality. The various subjective realities of the characters overlap and compete with one another. For example, Reiss loathes The Grasshopper Lies Heavy; Juliana is fascinated by the book; and Childan treats it as an unremarkable conversation item. Like the characters, the audience is made to assemble an objective reality from the competing strands of subjective reality that are portrayed in the novel. By introducing Reiss after every other character, however, the novel forces the audience to modify and evolve this unified objective reality (which is, in essence, the plot of the novel). Reiss's late introduction is a reminder that there are always more subjective viewpoints that must be understood in the construction of the greater objective reality, meaning that the construction of such an objective reality is impossible. The narrative, like the experiences of the characters and the theme of the novel, is an attempt to piece together the most satisfying, most tangible narrative from a series of subjective experiences.

Frank performs a version of this process in miniature. Juliana has left him, but he still loves her. As such, he tries to view his actions and decisions through the framework of how Juliana would react. Frank no longer has access to Juliana's immediate thoughts and feelings. He is forced to assemble several subjective memories and experiences with Juliana to create a version of her inside his head. This fictionalized version of Juliana is idealized and incomplete, as Frank simply cannot know Juliana in her totality. He only knows a small part of her; the version of her that he creates in his mind is an inherently subjective interpretation of his former wife. As a result, Frank bases all his decisions on how a fictionalized, idealized version of his ex-wife might react. As the characters try to piece together reality from competing subjective interpretations, Frank tries to plan his future based entirely on the imagined reactions of a subjective interpretation of Juliana, rather than the real Juliana. Neither Juliana nor an objective reality are accessible for Frank, so he must make do with what he can.