In A Scanner Darkly, Fred encounters many different factors from his surroundings that alter his identity and cause him to wonder who he truly is. Fred's use of substance D, along with the use of the scramble suit he wore to conceal his identity while undercover, adds to his confusion of knowing what his true identity is.
Heavy drug abuse has been proven to have a very negative effect upon the user on knowing who they really are. In Exploring The Relationship Between Implicit Self-Representation And Drug Use, Brener states “With drug users suggest that a drug user’s identity becomes entangled with their drug-use routines and habits and comes to represent the everyday self. They argue that this is the process of ‘‘gradual sedimentation of …show more content…
By using the drug, Arctor's two brain hemispheres compete against each other instead of working together as one. When one side gets affected, the other tries to compensate. The two different sides of the brain competing can relate to how Arctor fights the everyday struggle of knowing what his identity is either of him being the undercover cop or the drug dealer. Since he even has to conceal his identity from his superiors, he eventually gets assigned to investigate himself, but due to all the Substance D he has to taken, he gets more and more confused about who he really is. This can all be set to the limits of one's character and how much the limits of identity can be stretched. Throughout the novel Fred maintains a dual identity, one being an undercover agent and the other being a druggie. Without him knowing that he is watching himself, the effects from substance D don't allow him to fully comprehend what his true identity is by what the drugs side effects have on him. Overall Arctor has the ability to use his undercover cover identity as an anchor, pulling himself back to his real life no matter how deep he goes into the culture of the drug life while being undercover. But from the moment he can’t toe the party line while at the Lions Club, it’s pretty obvious that the line to his anchor has been broken and been completely drawn into the …show more content…
It makes him feel like just a vague blur like he stated and not actually the real him because no one knows it's really him when he has the scramble suit on. Dick also states "Roaming aimlessly along like this on the public streets with all kinds of people, he always had a strange feeling as to who he was"(Dick 27). Fred felt that with or without his scramble suit he still felt like a doper and by using this suit he didn't know who he really was anymore and only just making things worse when it came to knowing what his true identity was. In the beginning the scramble was just intended as a cover up to hide his true identity when going undercover, but it soon led to his change in identity as a whole by feeling that he always has this suit on. Dick states "As he had said to the Lions types there in the hall, he looked like a doper when out of his scramble suit...” (Dick 27). It shows us how he feels with or without the scramble suit he feels like a doper. As they would know that nobody in this book is who they seem to be, that everyone is a part of some conspiracy, that live a double life and that they could never know who they are actually talking to. Even the one that he asked to watch while undercover, which is Donna has a scramble suit which has been watching Arctor. With the involvement of the scramble suit, they show Bob and Fred struggling to