Hume & Lit

I don't know how obvious or obscure I was being; what I was thinking of was Hume's notion that personality (the way you think of it) doesn't exist, only the stream of thoughts and memories.

I've noticed that the way Peter finds Marxist interpretative theory of literature useful despite recognizing Marxism as a poor theory to describe human nature, so also there are other philosophical theories that are quite erroneous or defective for describing human nature that have an applicability in describing art.

For instance, consider a character in a stream-of-consciousness novel.  There isn't any such person who exists in reality.  All there is is the string of thoughts, like in Hume's theory.  Or how about existentialism? Consider a fictional character such as Homer Simpson.  There isn't any such person as Homer Simpson.  There are only the things Homer Simpson does in the show.  From those you can abstract a mental conception of a person, but there isn't a being with the nature of Homer Simpson.  Existence thus precedes essence (even if the essence exists only mentally).