Quail's Identity

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick is a short story, whose protagonist, Douglas Quail, starts off unhappy with his seemingly unimportant place in the world but ends up the most important person in the world. With that being said, Quail’s identity takes several sharp turns as his memories ebb and flow from him. Who and what he thinks he is changes frequently over the short story. Quail’s struggles with his identity embodies Buddhism’s three Marks of Existence; Unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and the non-self. The constant changes, like unstable memory and the story’s events, Quail, through these tenets of Buddhism, show that an individual’s identity is not a stable one. The first of the Three Marks of Existence is that life is “unsatisfactoriness”. The Sanskrit word for it is ‘dukkah’; English does not have a solid translation for the word, but the terms used to explain it would be “unsatisfactoriness” or …show more content…
Impermanence is the idea that nothing is ever fixed, stable or constant. This idea also applies to identity. Quail’s presumed identity at the beginning of the story is not the same as it is by the end of the story. While Quail is the protagonist, he seems to be unimportant person. He is “a miserable little salaried employee”, who has big dreams of going to Mars, and is in a marriage he is not happy with (Dick 305). Quail’s identity as an unhappy, unimportant worker, changes to that of someone who is more important. While being confronted by two Interplan agents, Quail recalls his memories of being on Mars and having killed a man after extensive training with Interplan (Dick 314). Lastly, Quail becomes the most important man in the world, after showing mice-like aliens kindness, they decide to halt their invasion of Earth until Quail’s death (Dick 319). While this paragraph seems like a summary, it shows how temporary identity, especially Quail’s identity, is as it changes depending on the