The Father-Thing

It struck me while reading Philip K. Dick’s “The Father-Thing” that this is the only text we have read so far in which the narrator(s) and/or central agents of the plot are children.

Keeping in mind Mendlesohn’s quote regarding “idea as the hero” perspective of the science fiction genre, this offered me a more personal interpretation of the story. The idea that “all things are not as they appear” and the subsequent dilemma of being one of a specific minority to see things as they “really are” is very much the “child’s dilemma” in that we may disregard so young an individual’s disturbing experiences as the product of vivid imagination or of a cognizance of the divide between fantasy and reality that has not completely developed yet.  My own “experiences” in childhood were of the more imaginative variety – I suffered from vivid night terrors and waking dreams for a number of years – but I remember that perhaps the most frightening aspect of those episodes was the emotional distress of not being believed by my parents, of feeling I had been “abandoned” to face phantoms for which I had no tangible way of dealing with as I was shoved hastily back into bed. Charles, by contrast, faces a much more immediate and physical threat in the form of “the father-thing,” – we have multiple witnesses to confirm the “thing’s” existence, from Peretti’s viewing of Mr. Walton’s empty skin to Mrs. Walton’s eventual admittance to Ted’s “strange” change of temperament. Nonetheless, the basic precedent of his predicament is the same: the figures of authority whom he trusts to come to his aid either disregard his situation as foolish/make-believe (Mrs. Walton) or are in and of themselves the threat at hand (Ted #2/the “father-thing”). It’s like a text-book domestic abuse case with an injection of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”