SOURCE: Easterbrook, Neil. “Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick's Double ‘Impostor.’” In Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations, edited by Samuel J. Umland, pp. 19-41. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Easterbrook cites the story “Impostor” as forming “several of Dick's paradigmatic gestures and traces a problem increasingly important to poststructural thought: that of the double and its emblematic representation of alterity.”

The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death (19).

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

The mouth which says ‘I’ or the hand which is raised to indicate that it is I who wish to speak, or I who have a toothache, does not thereby point to anything (68).

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them (2).

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis

“Impostor” has long been recognized as...