In Dick's work, the relationship betwen the drugs, the dissolution, the self-destructiveness and the beauty of the vision, is unusually direct. As he revealed in A Scanner Darkly , Dick knew he had destroyed himself. But the novel, like La Strada and Ironweed , ends with a tiny tick of redemption. In Dick's novels, the protagonists always, and persuasively, rise above death. Love, or its possibility, leads them to be better than they are.
Love transcends horror, hallucination and ashes and creates beauty.
Yet Dick in real life was paranoid, chaotic and destructive to the people around him. He did not want to be. His novels are his personal vision of the horror and his statement of the possible. The last-minute, vestigial nobility of Dick's characters represents what he himself wished to be. Though he never achieved it, he deserves our respect, because most people don't recognize the good or seek it.