Caroline Abendsen Character Analysis

In consultation with the oracle, Juliana tells Abendsen and his wife that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy reveals the “Inner Truth” of their world. But rather than welcoming this pronouncement, the Abendsen are shocked and horrified. In this passage, Juliana reflects on the difficulty of truth—and in a novel that treats forgery as art and false identities as a tool for good, truth often does seem “terrible.”

But interestingly, while the novel blurs the line between deception and creation, it also values interior truth and personal epiphanies. And throughout The Man in the High Castle, truth often is a kind of positive “death”: when characters arrive at a new understanding, they must give up their old comfortable views and coping mechanisms and “create” themselves anew.

That is why, in the closing paragraphs of the novel, Juliana reflects that she is “lucky” to have found even a painful truth. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy allows Juliana to exit her own life and enter another one. In this novel, which consistently celebrates human existence and experience on the smallest scale, artistic truth forces Juliana into a kind of death—and at the same time, it allows her to create, to continue, to “go on living.”