Philip K. Dick discussion

(I'm hoping that the Moderators will allow this post as a new discussion because the last topic about this book was back in 2011 and the member who started it has since been deleted.)

So I just finished, Flow my tears, the policeman said. ****SPOILERS!****

?????????

To me it makes sense that Flow My Tears was written just before PKD's religious epiphany. The novel is a total departure from his fiction of the 1950's and 1960's, when his writing was fresh and bursting with everything about it that most of us loved. This book was written with a dead hand; there were never any true heroes in PKD's novels, but Jason Taverner is a character with which I could not identify at all. His genetically engineered "superiority" and his loathing towards the "ordinaries" made me disposed to hate him from page one. (As a social worker I was trained in recognizing symptoms of psychological disorders, and Taverner hits points for Narcissistic Personality Disorder as well as Anti-Social Personality Disorder. For example: general lack of empathy, superficial charm, belief that he was superior and needed to connect with only a certain class of people, view of people as how they could be of use to him and then coldy discards them and belief that he DESERVED a particular lifestyle because of his genetically engineered superiority, etc.)

Now this is just my opinion, mind. I'm not forcing this on anyone else, this is just my view of the novel, but for me the beginning and end of the novel never connected. In chapter one Taverner goes to see the girl he slept with who didn't have any talent and she threw a kind of a jelly-fish at him; he then wakes up in the hospital and talks about feeling the tentacles still inside his chest, but Heather Hart and the doctor assure him that he will be fine.

Next page Jason wakes up in the stereotypical 20th century flea bag city hotel and his life becomes a waking nightmare.

Fast forward to Jason's meeting with Alys Buckman. She gives him a dose of what is supposed to be mescaline but obviously isn't, and when Jason goes to look for her, he finds a severely aged skeleton in her clothing. But afterwards, he finds that he's gotten his life back, though he's so paranoid by that point that he wonders if it all isn't a lifelong, drug-induced hallucinatory experience.

Then they find Alys's body (???), and the coroner goes on and on in a particularly long stretch of bad writing (show, don't tell), which ends up explaining how Alys's ingestion of this new test drug shot Jason Taverner into a reality where he didn't exist, only to drag everyone back with him to the reality where he DID exist when Alys died and the drug ceased to have any effect.

So could someone please explain what the jellyfish-creature had to do with Alys Bucksman's ingestion of the experimental substance? Did the jellyfish have anything to do with the story?

By and large I was disappointed with Flow My Tears; the writing was sub-par and every single character was PKD himself, disguised; even Ruth, the pottery lady and Alys. This was first published the year of Dick's "religious revelation" (I'm not discounting it, but I don't know because I wasn't there), and that is the only thing about this novel that makes any sense. He was literally at the end of his psychological and creative rope when he wrote this book. It's no wonder that he was rejuvenated by an experience which we can neither deny nor confirm, but which changed the direction of his life and gave him a new reason to live.

If anyone can connect the events of the first chapter to the rest of the novel; or explain how Alys Buckman, who never even met Taverner until he'd been arrested and bugged, was responsible for the creation of the potential alternate reality in which he didn't exist and then suddenly died, freeing him, please respond to this topic and explain it to me. Because for the life of me I am very, very perplexed.

Thank you for your attention.