Where's Mary Sue When You Need Her?: Difference between revisions

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Note that these are all objective, not products of the narrator's mind, but sense data coming to him. As Quine notes, such a universe is "overpopulated" and a "breeding group for disorderly elements," both cognitively—such as multiple inconsistent Darias and Janes—and morally—witness amoral drug-dealing Daria.

The difficulties of following such a narrative consist in having to knowingly suspend many of the tacit assumptions of ordinary sense perception. We do not expect multiple solid entities to occupy the same space, or for a single entity to appear in multiple locations at once. The theoretic difficulties Quine mentions—"How many possible men are there in that doorway?...[I]s the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselves and distinct from one another?"—are no longer theoretical difficulties, but real hazards of sensory overload. The only single continuous narrative thread in the final chapter is MacGillicutty's narration of his experiences being so assaulted, and his attempts to cling to a single narrative possibility.

Finally, this ontology means not only that all the so-called [[Daria_Multiverse|Daria Universes]] are actually contained in Daria-501, but that infinitely many others are in Daria-501. Whether there are [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number#Aleph-null &alefsym;0] or more universes in Daria-501 is a question MacGillicutty raises only to demonstrate that he remembers something of his college studies. He suspects the cardinality to be [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum 2&alefsym;0] and that a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonalization_argument diagonalization argument] of some sort could be used.

==Characters Introduced==