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

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the wall which in his waking life blocks his view
into the past and prevents him from succeeding in his
conscious quest. The miracle happens:
Person... was on the imagined brink
of imagined bliss when Armande's
footfalls approached... (102).
In other words, his dream is on the point of granting
him what real life has withheld: "... a moment of con-
tact with [Armande's]
essential image in exactly re-
membered surroundings. "
Yet, this does not describe quite accurately what
is happening at that moment, and the author, striving
for the utmost precision, realizes this. The distinction
between dream and reality again does not hold
for Hugh. Once more they are seen to merge, or rather,
his dream assumes for him the appearance of reality,
making the qualifying epithet superfluous and
"striking out both 'imagined' in the proof's margin"
(102): He was on the brink of bliss when Armande's
footfalls approached, and he experiences elation "at
[the] moment of her... dawning through the limpid door
of his room... " (102). In Hugh's case, then, no neat
distinction seems possible between dream and reality.
How can his experiences be defined as mere "dreams"
if, by penetrating the outward veneer of reality,
they allow him glimpses of what his waking mind cannot
uncover for him, and thereby enrich his picture of
reality? How, too, can they be called mere "dreams"
if they are for him as "real" as anything he experiences
in waking life? On the other hand, his dreams
do not represent and reproduce reality faithfully but