Lew looked around. Was it still Chicago?
* * * * * * * * * *
The reader might suspect, "Yes, of course it is still Chicago." But we've got to perceive things through Lew's eyes. We need to be more philosophical about it. It's definitely not the same place Lew had just tried to escape to with his marriage, abandoned, but intact. A place where he would go to live knowing his coworkers had just accepted his retreat without consequence. No, Lew was now in a Chicago where he has been completely and utterly humiliated and abandoned. How can it be the same place?
Besides, we were told earlier that Lew and Troth were walking through an unmappable and formerly unknown, possibly only newly extant, neighborhood. Was it still Chicago? Was Lew still Lew? How much has to change before any thing becomes another thing entirely? I think there's a philosophical story about a boat that deals with this, although more in the physical and less in the abstract. This is a Ship of Theseus metaphor about the amount of abstract things that can change before a thing becomes completely different.
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