Summary: The Penultimate Truth

For fifteen years, humanity has been fed lies supplemented by never-ending broadcasts of destruction and danger. But above the surface, a different kind of reality ensues, and the millions of people crammed in ant tanks still have no indication that the last decade was spent in vain. In his novel, The Penultimate Truth, Philip K. Dick takes a revolutionary stance on the exploitations of those with power and those with none, through a fictional story taking place in the year 2025. Nicholas St. James, the president of the Tom Mix ant tank, finally comes up to the surface only to discover that what he thought to be reality was actually deception. Talbot Yancy, the protector that delivered motivational speeches to the ant tanks below, was actually

Adams evidently feels intimidated by Lantano’s excellent control and display of language, to the point in which he feels insecure. When Adams comes to plead for his help, he begs frantically, “nobody has your ability. Brose needs you; without such people, young brilliant new Yance-men like you coming into the Agency, we’ll ultimately make a mistake” (Dick, 153). Everything in the novel is set up so intricately that language holds a very powerful leverage. Lantano clearly holds power through his mastery of language. Power and language are interconnected in that way. Lantano is able to convey his words with finesse, so much that he is able to successfully deceive the ant tankers. An example being when he has to conjure a speech for the daily Yancy broadcast, he states that “the abridgment of your reality, the deprivation of your rightful life… And you will not be able to curse us because you will not even recall that we existed” (Dick, 59). He is able to lure the ant tankers into deception because his language is foolproof. Through adequate knowledge of language, deception is able to be entailed, and through deception comes power. Acknowledged even by Adams, without great writers such as Lantano, there are bound to be slips of error that will eradicate everything they have worked for in the past decade. Adams, fearing his expendable position as a Yance-man,

However, this whole falsified conception was concocted by Brose, a man persistently trying to fulfill his own selfish greed. Through the skillful manipulation of language and communication, those in power successfully blindsided the millions living in ant tanks. Yet, it only took a select few people to uncover what had been buried so deep below the surface; the truth had finally been discovered for what it was by Nicholas. Despite Brose’s efforts to manipulate both above and below the surface with his fictional documentaries and carefully devised speeches effectively brainwashing the millions below, Nicholas St. James is determined to let the truth reign. But with such a deluded sense of truth from both the ant tankers and the Yance-men, is it even a feat able to be accomplished? There are just too many different interpretations of truth from the different segments of society that it seems unlikely for there to be one ultimate truth that can be attained. Even prominent in society now with things such as propaganda and pseudo-events, society is controlled by the government and the rich; similarly Brose and the