Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Fictional characters may raise serious troubles about their identity even within one and the same story. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, for instance, depicts a world pretty much like ours, in which there seems to be no indeterminate identity, yet leaves it open whether the Shade character is the same as the Kinbote character. On the contrary, in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there seems to be two characters, Kumiko and the Woman in the hotel room, that are indeterminately identical. Worse still, there are also cases of inconsistent identity: in…