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

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"Silly, perhaps, but at least clear", he comments on
this (13). It is really not at all clear at this point.
It is only in connection with what one learns later
about Hermann's creative ambition that it becomes somewhat
clearer. He implies in this passage that it is
his power to write, his ability to express ideas vividly
which is the source of all the recent events. Without
his creative faculties "nothing at all would have
happened", and this seems to say quite clearly that
nothing at all has happened.
Yet, in spite of this remark, Hermann is assertive
throughout about the truth of what he is telling. But
Hermann is mad. Many passages, quite apart from his
stylistic idiosyncrasies, indicate a confused state
of mind: "My hands tremble, I want to shriek or to
smash something with a bang... " (14), "I have been sitting
in a queer state of exhaustion, now listening to
the rushing and crashing of the wind... then starting
up all aquiver... " (15); "I was not much out of doors:
it frightened me, that thunder in my head... " (192);
and though, ostensibly, it is at some hotel in France
that he is writing his tale and, later, in some rented
room in a little French village, his attention fails
at some points and the mention of "long white passages"
where the doctor "would buttonhole me" (193), and his
mention of the "madhouse" (83) give awaythe fact that
he is locked up in an asylum.
It appears from a great many things that his grasp
of reality has for a long time been rather uncertain,
that at some point he lost it altogether, and that,