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

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sions have the essential quality in common. They
both make transparent how incidents and possibilities
and seeming coincidences combine (or are combined? )
into an intricate pattern of moves by which the
fate of one man, who is totally unaware of it all,
is decided. This taken into account, Kinbote's version
does not look all that absurd any more, and it
ceases looking absurd once one realizes that his
story is the artistic version of the bare and ordinary
facts. His imagination removes the events from
the level of the crude and commonplace onto the
level of art and leaves the sober facts to the "scurrilous
and the heartless", to all those "for whom
romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies,
the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply
do not exist. " (85) Into his story go other persons
and elements from his immediate surroundings. Persons
from the Campus go through an artistic process of
transformation and get involved in the dramatic action.
Gerald Emerald, who repeatedly irritates Kinbote,
appears as "one of the greater Shadows" (255),
the Shadow, in fact, from whom the murderer Gradus
learns where to find the King. He is easily recognized
not only by his "green velvet jacket" (255) but
by his very name, 'Izumrudov' being Russian for "em-
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erald". There is also Gordon, Assistant Professor,
a musician, who lends his name to a young boy, described
in the Index as "a musical prodigy and an
amusing pet" (310).
Mary McCarthy, by a series of ingenious conclu-