Confessions is “experimental” only in that it was written without regard for novelistic conventions. Dick’s value as a writer lies in his unusual and unusually vivid perceptions of the world we live in and the way people behave, especially the way they behave towards each other. These perceptions dictate the form and substance of his novels. In this case, the story is told in the first person by each of three different characters, in different chapters; there are also sections where third person narrative is used. This is unusual, but it works; those few novels of Dick’s where he has tried to shoehorn his perceptions into a “novelistic structure” that did not originate within himself do not work half as well. Dick’s books are uniquely structured, not out of self-conscious experimentation in the manner of writers who are aware of themselves as part of some “avant-garde” movement, but out of simple necessity.

Dick made some fascinating comments about his attitude towards writing in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff at Harcourt, Brace and Company, written February 1st, 1960, at a time when Dick was most actively engaged in trying to market his “mainstream” novels:

Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once… Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness… If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.