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

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rearrange the elements that constitute it. "All dreams
are anagrams of diurnal reality" (80), and the dream
during which he strangles Armande is perhaps the best
example of this. The author may concede by means of a
stylistic twist that Hugh is experiencing real and
not just imagined bliss at the crucial moment before
his death, but he cannot go so far as to grant to that
moment of unique and subjective "reality" the full and
general meaning that the word rea1ity has
without quotation marks.
Hugh's example has implications that reach far
beyond his individual case. It is an example that
stands for many, one might even say that it reflects
a problem that concerns all men. It seems that nobody
can be certain of the reality of anything, for Hugh's
case suggests that whenever we take something for a
real experience, it might be only a dream. In fact,
what we take for real life, might be no more than a
whole series of somewhat logically connected dreams.
If men have ever worried about this, they are not
always actively aware of it, or rather, they have
learnt to live with it: "Men have learned to live with
a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition
that 'reality' may be only a' dream'', (9 3) .
Once more,
Nabokov has demonstrated the general and metaphysical
need for quotation marks round "reality"; and he takes
the speculation even a step further:
How much more dreadful it would be if
the very awareness of your being aware
of reality's dreamlike nature were also
a dream, a built-in hallucination! (93),