Multiverse and Alternate Selves in Self-Portrait with Nothing: Theme Analysis

The Thematic Claim in Brief: Identity Is Plural, and Art Makes It Tangible, for Better and Worse. The novel's central claim about the multiverse is that identity is not singular but composed of countless potential versions of a person, and that art—specifically Ula Frost's portraiture—is the force that makes those potentials tangible and consequential. The theme asks whether we are defined by the lives we actually lived or by the lives we might have lived, and it refuses to give a comfortable answer. The multiverse here is not a scientific abstraction but a deeply personal structure, one that shapes Pepper Rafferty's search for her mother and her own sense of self. The novel's epigraph, drawn from Tomas Tranströmer's poem