Imposter and the Problem of Self-realization; or Oh Gods He's Blogging About Class Again

My first assignment in Eng 423 is to read the short story Imposter by Philip K. Dick. I will admit that the first thing I did upon learning the premise of the story was to skip to the end to find out what happens. There's very little in the way of spoilers to me since half the time a classmate or professor will spill the beans anyway, plus the story is only 14 pages long in the anthology we're reading. So consider this a spoiler warning if you care.

What strikes me about the ending is not the fact that Olham is actually the Outspace robot carrying a bomb, but rather the dissonance within the assumed knowledge that the detonation sequence for the U-Bomb would be in a spoken phrase. The last lines:

"But if that's Olham, then I must be -"
He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri. [emphasis mine] 

The implication of this penultimate sentence being that the phrase "But if that's Olham" is the trigger. Let's pause for a moment. The trigger (if indeed it was a spoken phrase), is a fairly innocuous utterance premised on a non-knowledge that Olham is not the real Olham but a robot impersonating him. Destruction hinges on the uncovering of knowledge and a verbal recognition of the deceit. The Outspacers were counting on the Earthlings to discover their ruse.

Had the authorities completely ignored the threat, the chances of that particular phrase being uttered are reduced to the level of turning Olham's life into a situational comedy where hijinks ensue. 

What's more, because of the particular ways in which Olham replicates the mind of Olham-prime, the robot was completely equipped to continue with the "Project" and ultimately be the doom of the Outspacers. 

Fundamentally then, it is the self-actualization of Olham as the robot that destroys humanity. Like a child who looks in the mirror and for the first time connects that what he is seeing is actually himself, once Olham sees the body he gives up the illusion that he is the human Olham, and then he explodes. The suggestion is that it is our humanity that destroys us, the constant yearning for knowledge and the "real" undoes us, especially when we are faced with the metaphysical realization that what we know as real isn't real at all. Once we're adrift from this basis, once we're destabilized, we are no more. It isn't just Olham who is destroyed, but given a blast "visible all the way to Alpha Centauri" the entirety of the solar system is gone.

To summarize, I'm really excited about this class.