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

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It probably is Mr. R. 's phantom, greeting Hugh just
as the living R. greeted him in life: "Hullo, p(P)erson!
" (1,30), soothing and reassuring bewildered Hugh
who has only just gone through the incomparable manoeuvre:
"Easy, you know, does it, son" (104), and
thus finishing the novel on an optimistic note by implying
that death is not the end of everything.
R., it has been seen, shares a lot of qualities
with Nabokov, and Nabokov is of course the master-mind
and presiding genius of the novel, even though he refuses
to be identified with R. There is a sly and
very inconspicuous hint which also establishes the
identity of Hugh Person. His surname, as was said
above, is so neutral as to apply to anyone, and the
same can be said of "Hugh" when pronounced by Armande,
and used by the author as "You". It is only two
thirds through the novel that the author discloses
whom precisely he has had in mind all along: "Our
Person, our reader... " (75).
Nabokov has at the end gone a long way towards
helping his reader overcome the limitations in which
his (our reader's, any person's) mind might be caught.
He has made him aware of these limitations, he has
broken the "thin veneer of immediate reality" and has
shown what vast fields of reality can be found behind
it, and he has offered a refuge in art, that "closed
circle of reliable land". He has tentatively broken
the wall that conceals the future and death and has
gone so far even as to steal a glimpse of "the other
shore". But there is one point beyond which he cannot