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

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Unlike Shade, however, Luzhin cannot accept what he
finds. His delight changes into dread and horror when
he realizes that the harmony he has detected is in
fact the harmony of chess. Move by move, he finds,
awesomely, elegantly, flexibly, the images of his
childhood have been repeated (168);
just
... as some combination, known from
chess problems, can be indistinctly repeated
on the board in actual play - so
now the consecutive repetition of a familiar
pattern was becoming noticeable in
his present life (168).
He suspects that the repetition will be continued, and
he knows that if this happens, it will be fatal, for
it will lead on to the same passion and ensuing catas-
trophe as before and destroy once more what he has
come to call "the dream of life" (190).
From the moment he is able to distinguish the com-
bination that has been worrying him for some time, his
whole life takes on in his mind the semblance of a mon-
strous game of chess. Even though he forbids himself
to think of actual games, he is able to think only in
chess images (190), and even sleep consists of
sixty-four squares, a gigantic board in
the middle of which, trembling and stark
naked, Luzhin stood, the size of a pawn,
and peered at the dim position of large
pieces, megacephalous, with crowns and
manes (186).
Dillard's statements describe accurately what Luzhin
experiences from now on. Although he has come to under-
stand through his art the pattern of events and inci-
dents in his life, and although he thinks he knows
what it will lead to if it is developed any further,
he is yet quite unable to interfere and to form the