''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

- 202 -
I'm
... going to show you not the painting
of a landscape, but the painting of different
ways of painting a certain landscape,
and I trust their harmonious fusion will
disclose the landscape as I intend you to
see it (89).
The passages from The Doubtful Asphodel indicate
that some of the central concerns of that novel are
the same as those of The Real Life, that in fact the
two novels mirror each other. "A man is dying: you
feel him sinking throughout the book" (163). His
thoughts and memories pervade that whole book.
Sometimes his personality is prominent, and sometimes
it fades in the background. He is the hero; the other
persons, in whom we recognize some from The Real Life,
appear only for short stretches of his way and then
disappear; they are "but commentaries to the: main
subject" (164). A man is-dying and at the moment of
his death the reader is made to feel "that we are
on the brink of some absolute truth, dazzling in its
splendour and at the same time almost homely in its
perfect simplicity" (166). One word from him before
he dies will disclose "some absolute truth", will,
in fact, disclose "the answer to all questions of life
and death" (167). But that one word is not uttered.
The man dies and the mystery remains. At this point
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight goes beyond The
Doubtful Asphodel, for if the reading of it which has
been offered is correct, it solves the riddle which
remains unsolved in that novel. It does so through
the exploration of yet another approach to reality,
present, but never fully explored in the earlier