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

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voice. He never relaxes, he is never self-obliviously
just himself. Part of him is constantly standing on the
side, as it were, watching, admiring, praising what he
is doing. While making love to his wife, he becomes joy-
fully aware of "a well-known kind of 'dissociation "'(37)
which enables him to enjoy these occasions both as an
active party and as a spectator, and which greatly in-
creases his ecstasy. It increases more and more the
farther he moves from the. scene, "the greater the inter-
val between my two selves" (38). Eventually the point is
reached where he cannot distinguish between his two
selves any more; he thinks he is where in fact he is not:
... one April night, ... as I was sitting
at my maximum distance of fifteen rows
of seats and looking forward to an especially
good show... from the distant bed, where
I thought I was, came Lydia's yawn and voice
stupidly saying that if I were not yet coming
to bed, I might bring her the red book she
had left in the parlor (38).
What then follows is not all that surprising Hermann's
mental make-up taken into account. On that particular
night the spell is broken. He tries for some time to
recover his singular ability, but abandons the attempt
when some new and more exciting and wonderful obsession
takes its place. His imagination, as has been seen, is
prone to providing reflections and repetitions on innu-
merable occasions, but something is missing in this world
of reflected and mirrored objects. Hermann is "uncon-
sciously tracking" it (19), "some force [is] driving
[him] along" (18) when he happens upon Felix. The moment
he sees him, he externalizes what has for a long time
been latent in his mind. He projects his own face onto
the face of another man, thereby creating a "real",