The dice thrower

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The Dice is a George Cockcroft novel published in 1971 under the pseudonym Luke Rhinehart .

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The book tells the story of the psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart from a first-person perspective. The 32-year-old is bored with his life as a family man and therapist and begins to make decisions with the help of a dice . What was intended as an occasional loosening up takes possession of Rhinehart, who after a short time leaves all life decisions to the dice.

Initially, he only decides everyday things such as the forms of treatment for his patients or the organization of his private life by rolling the dice. In the further course of the plot, Rhinehart develops the theory that every person has multiple personalities that he can discover and act out using the cube. The result of these considerations is the so-called cube therapy. Rhinehart then breaks with his professional and private life and devotes himself entirely to spreading his theory, making his decisions solely with the help of the cube.

A cult around the cube theory quickly developed . Due to the social impact, Rhinehart is declared an enemy of the state and is now constantly on the run. The dice theory is spreading as a concept of life / religion-like cult. Rhinehart's personal fate remains open. The plot is taken up again with a long time lag in the books Adventures of Wim and Der Sohn des Würflers . In the latter, the now grown-up son of the dice turns into a despiser of his father's anarchic dice theory.

Pop culture references

  • The track The Dice Man by the English rock band The Fall on the LP Dragnet (1979).
  • The song Random I Am by the band Millencolin tells of the influence of the dice theory.
  • Aphex Twin has occasionally used the name The Dice Man as an alias .
  • The Discovery Channel series The Diceman (1997), in which the protagonists followed the decisions of a die from episode to episode in a kind of reality TV format.
  • The Canadian-British TV miniseries Dice (2001) is based on the dice theory.
  • In the last episode of the film Four Rooms , Quentin Tarantino names the main actor “Diceman”, because he represents the chance factor in a bet.
  • The band Talk Talk was inspired by The Dice Man for their song Such a Shame .

Text output

in German published by

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage of the series
  2. ↑ IMDb entry
  3. ↑ fluter-magazin ( Memento from April 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )

Web links