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

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made to shine through life's foolscap. "" 11
With Hugh perceiving only a tiny fraction of reality
and even of his own life, he might even now be said
to justify the author's "need for quotation marks"
(93) round "reality"; something else definitely establishes
the need for them. If Person is remarkable in
any one respect it is because of the way in which his
conscious life and his dreams interfere with each other
to such an extend that he cannot distinguish between
them. This begins in his youth when he gets out of
bed in the middle of the night and behaves as if fully
conscious, and it leads to his fight with the bedside
table. He is later in life troubled by what he calls
dream anguish and recurrent nightmares. In a dream
inspired by recollections of real impressions and in-
cidents he strangles Armande; it is a recurring dream
of Armande that has made him come back to Switzerland
12
He experiences even the moment of death in dream pictures.
If all this is frightening, there is also a moment
at which the confusion is conducive to happiness.
When, as a child, Hugh got up in the middle of the
night in his "spectral fits" and walked about the
house, he would "[circumvent] all obstacles in his
magic sleep" (20): unconsciously, in his dreams, he
would avoid very real things, such as wet towels and
basins with water, which his parents had placed at
strategic points. Likewise, in his sleep and dream
at the hotel, his mind circumvents all the obstacles
that his memory has created, and it also penetrates