Word: plurality
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...that the whole world is me, and as Mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me. This species of solipsism-plural solipsism, if you like-is far more common because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very congenial world populated exclusively by creatures of one's own likeness, a world in which Lincoln pines for his dinner with André or, more consequentially, where KGB chiefs...
Such breathtaking non sequiturs (cardiological or otherwise) are characteristic of plural solipsism. For it is more than just another happy vision. It is meant to have practical consequences. If people everywhere, from Savannah to Sevastopol, share the same hopes and dreams and fears and love of children (and good food), they should get along. And if they don't, then there must be some misunderstanding, some misperception, some problem of communication. As one news report of the recent conference of Soviet and American peace activists in Minneapolis put it, "The issue of human rights sparked a heated discussion...
...above which flit innumerable gnats. Newcomers reveal their newness by slapping at the gnats. Natives just shrug and blow them away. It is a region in which people, upon taking leave of one another, say either "Better come go with us" or "Stay with us"-no matter whether the plural applies. The stranger who says "O.K." to either proposition is regarded...
...first person plural "we," is Chase's greatest and most effective innovation. The narrators are two sets of sisters--Anne and Katie, Jenny and Celia--whose lives are so intertwined it seems quite natural that their feelings and impressions are unified. "Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal" Together they play and grow, all the while watching the lives around them from a single perspective. The daughters present a wealth...
...single speaker by elimination: Katie has crawled under the stall door, Anne is wedged there, and Jenny is looking for a dime, so it must be Celia. But no, we have established that it is not Celia. The speaker stays hidden, and her stubborn use of the first person plural makes the point that she and the others moved about the big house like fish in a school...