ACCORDING TO PERCIVAL EVERETT, at the root of almost everything he writes are “problems of logic.” “I’m interested in the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A,” he said in an interview with this magazine, “and even as I say it, it gives me a headache.” This problem of logical identity, when applied to character and personality, whether within a novel or without, leads to questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia: Can we say that I am the same human being if my character changes fundamentally? If my name changes? If I receive a heart transplant? If we replaced all of the parts of a sailing vessel, one by one, would we say it’s the same ship? Everett’s narrators are preoccupied with such questions, if indirectly, and seem concerned with their detachment from themselves and from others, preoccupied with a feeling of being outsiders to their age and milieu. They are liable to comment ironically on extremely dangerous situations and say the wrong thing at parties, and they are repeatedly finding that A may be A, but A is not equal to A.
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