Character Analysis: We Can Build You

In Dick’s novel We Can Build You, many of his characters were afflicted with mental illnesses or severe emotional conflicts. The novel told the story of a small business called MASA Associates that was owned by Louis Rosen and Maury Rock. They initially sold spinets and mood organs, however, in an attempt to make more money, they developed two simulacra: one of Edwin M. Stanton and one of Abraham Lincoln. The simulacra were designed by a girl named Priscilla Frauenzimmer, the daughter of Maury Rock, and built by a man named Bob Bundy, who had a tendency “to wander off without notice […] and he [would not] look you in the eye[...] He’s what the Federal Bureau of Mental Health psychiatrists [called] dilapidated” (Dick, We Can Build You 5). From

The simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln was chosen to reflect the author’s failures in marriage and the effects they had on his mental state. As Louis Rosen was making an effort to learn more about Lincoln’s past before asking for his advice about Priscilla, with whom he was in love, he learned that Lincoln was once in love with a woman named Ann Rutledge, who died of malaria in 1835. According to the article Louis was reading, her death made the president fall into “a state of morbid depression which appeared to have given rise to the report that he had a streak of insanity” (Dick, We Can Build You 187). After calling off a wedding with another woman several years later, Lincoln wrote: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me” (Dick, We Can Build You 188). After his divorces, especially his divorce from Nancy Hackett, Dick became severely depressed and suicidal, which is how Lincoln was when Ann Rutledge died. The divorces ultimately led Dick to choose Abraham Lincoln as a vital part of his novel due to the striking similarities in their misfortunes. Lincoln’s severe depression allowed

One issue his characters Priscilla and Louis could relate on was their schizophrenia. Priscilla had struggled with it for most of her life, and she had been stuck in a mental hospital “since her third year in high school; tests administered routinely in the public schools had picked up her ‘dynamism of difficulty’ [...] in the popular vernacular, her schizophrenic condition” (Dick, We Can Build You 20). She was free for a majority of the story, however, by the end of the story she was readmitted, and speculated that she would most likely be kept in the institution for the rest of her life. Louis’ schizophrenic condition was caused by his obsession over Priscilla. He started to have a hallucination about having sexual intercourse with her, and after being sent to the psychiatrist, he was determined to have what was referred to as the “Magna Mater” type of schizophrenia. This meant that “[his] life [was] devoted to worshipping Pris as if she were a goddess. [Louis had] projected her archetype onto the universe; [he saw] nothing but her, everything else to [him was] unreal” (Dick, We Can Build You 239). Dick’s own schizophrenia motivated him to include the condition in his novel; his experience gave him a better understanding of it, and writing about how it affected people allowed him to convey how he was affected by it. By