Daniel Brady is involved in some form of protest movement. He is an informant for the government. His testimony has landed fellow activists in prison. He is living under the protection of the federal witness program and chafes at the vigilance of his handler. The Squealer can be described as a psychological thriller. 

However, the central question concerns his betrayal of a movement he had embraced, the means of his turning and, as significantly, the apparatus still holding him in check. Daniel Brady must come to grips with events that led to his conversion, incidents he has largely forgotten or submerged but which reappear in renewed force with his first, tenuous attempts to return to the world as an independent agent. Through memories, dreams, and hallucinations, a picture forms of Brady’s break with his former self: he suffered a deep trauma though he is unable to clearly identify the antagonist. He is experiencing dissociation – he quite literally sees himself as three distinct, separate personalities that emerge in episodes of panic attacks. He is divided inside himself and divided from others, his identity broken in the crucible of his rendition. 

Brady’s story operates as a critique of -- not so much the institutions of control, or economic class, or some shadowy elite -- those mechanisms of power intended to control the individual in a continuous and permanent way. The handling, the conversion, of Brady is an extreme form of a practice common to technologized society through which the individual is observed, interpreted, evaluated, and tied to a grid of regulation that extends over actions, ways of being and thinking. The individual is literally subjected, molded into a subject. 

The Squealer aims to shed light on the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the latter is used to control and define the individual. But is the subject the only possible form of existence? Aren’t there experiences in which the subject might be able to dissociate from itself, sever the relations with itself, lose its identity? The most intense point of life is where the subject comes up against power, struggles with power, concentrates its forces to evade the traps of power. Brady’s rendition is one example of just such a limit-experience that wrenches the subject free. Brady escapes into the unfinished and the unknown, the terrain situated past the brink of rationality. His destination is precisely the self -- in its rawest, unconditional form.