In the book - its a book also called 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' my reading of it (and its just my reading) is the author is from an alternative reality (or maybe 'our' world and he wrote a fictional history of another third world, its complex) - julia slips into that reality at the end of the book (we see another character slip realities for a moment earlier).
That's not my read on the ending. But people have been arguing over what Dick meant at the end for fifty years.
If you do a Google search on the meaning of the ending of
High Castle, you can find all sorts of theories. It's probably best for the open-ended, ambiguous nature of it that Dick never finished and published the sequel he worked on in the early 70s.
In light of what happens to Dick and his 2-3-74 experience, it's tempting to read the ending of
High Castle as presaging his own "pink light" experience. Juliana, like the dark haired girl, shows up at the home of an author and imparts with the author an epiphany about the nature of world, specifically that the world the author lives in is unreal. In Dick's case, it was the belief that we are trapped in a "Black Iron Prison" and these are actually Roman times. In Hawthorne Abendsen's case, it was that Germany and Japan lost the war.
I take Juliana's fate quite literally. The last line of the book says she's on her way back to her motel, and I see no reason to doubt that. I don't think she escapes to the world of
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (which isn't our world, either -- Hitler is captured and put on trial) anymore than Tagomi escapes to our world (his hallucination of the Embarcadero Expressway). I think they simply know that the world they live in isn't
right.
The way Juliana uses the
I Ching annoys me. The three-coin method is simple and quick, but it produces skewed results from the traditional yarrow stalk method. (I use the four-coin method which produces results identical percentage-wise to the yarrow stalks.) So I find her Hexagram 61 at the conclusion suspect.
I also think it's clear that Abendsen isn't from another world. He's quite confused (and his wife quite angry) at Juliana's insistence, with the
I Ching's backing, that the world isn't right. Perhaps he, like PKD believed about himself, he's actually someone else trapped and blinded by reality. But, as far as Abendsen is concerned, the world he lives in
is real. Even if his world isn't real, he
believes it to be so.
