A multiple-worlds...

March 28, 2012 #

A multiple-worlds interpretation of the Huxtable narrative, however, raises a plethora of new questions about the final scene of the series finale of The Cosby Show. In the final moments of the Huxtable narrative, Cliff and Claire Huxtable break the proverbial fourth wall and step out of their singular ontological zone into the textual void or what Warren Ellis terms “the bleed” between universes or worlds. Might this bold action represent an attempt by Cliff (and to some measure Claire, but remember that Cliff is the one who in fact leads her out of their universe or world) at quantum suicide? Is Cliff—who seems, by that point in the narrative to have mastered his developing hetero-ontological awareness—aware that there is more than one version of “himself” in the multiverse and that he cannot, in theory, truly die? Does this action represent his surrender, his willingness to depart his universe or world; his defeat and realization of his own singular yet impossibly divided self; or a further stage on his quest to reconcile himself with his disparate selves spread throughout the multiverse?

—Contemplating the quantum suicide of Cliff Huxtable. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Selections From the Cosby Codex: Selection 14: Part Two of Toward a Conception of Blakian Prophetic Mythology in (and through) the Huxtable Narrative: The Many Worlds (and Multiple Histories) of Bill Cosby and the Quantum Suicide of Cliff Huxtable.

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