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

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perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming
a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences"
(IB, 22). All other souls are "transparent to one another"
(IB, 21); he alone is not transparent. He is
"a lone dark obstacle" (IB, 21).
He has been different from those around him ever
since he was a child. With other children he lived in
a "canary-yellow, large cold house" (IB, 86) to be
prepared for life, or, as it appeared to him even
then for "secure nonexistence" (IB, 86). That canaryyellow
house, it would seem, was a school, in which
the flexible minds of children were influenced and
formed and bent in such a way that they eventually
conformed to what society and the state required from
them.
As the only one among his coevals, Cincinnatus refused
to have his mind formed (deformed, one should
say, in the face of what emerges from the novel). He
tried in his youth to conceal the fact that his mind
was and remained different; he would turn his soul
this way and that, "employing a complex system of optical
illusions" (IB, 21), making his mind resemble
the minds of others by the "manipulation of cunningly
illuminated facets and angles" (IB, 21). Now that he
has given that up, the nature of his mind is all too
obvious: it has retained its original form, that of
a black block that is "impervious to the rays of
others" (IB, 20).
The system in Bend Sinister is grim and frigthening
and, after all, Krug is its victim, but at the