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

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cripples and also singularly unattractive.
But the absurdly improbable concentration of the
ugly, the repulsive and physically abnormal and the
manner in which these are described, give a comic
touch to what appears at the first sight merely pathetic
and monstrous. And the reaction to this mixture
of incompatibles is a twofold one of disgust and amusement.
It is not surprising that the gathering of this
unique bunch of people should gradually take on more
and more of the qualities of a grotesquely nonsensical
and at the same time nightmarish dream. Strangely,
absurdly, as can happen only in a dream, they bring
not only their dead ones but "all their furniture",
too (IB, 84): household utensils, "even individual
sections of walls continued to arrive" (IB, 90); a
"cheerless little tricycle with orthopaedic attachments"
is pushed in; a mirrored wardrobe, which in its
turn, "brought with it its own private reflection"
(IB, 90) of, among other things, a dropped glove: the
glove Marthe is looking for, and that her escort picks
up when they leave.
Thus, the scene is set for a family reunion, and
as at any family gathering, there is some quarrelling,
some whispering, some joking, and some nonsense from
the children. But at various points, and without the
slightest previous warning, these extraordinary people
leave the realm of normality and do and say the most
peculiar things; again they behave as one knows only
people in dreams to behave. One of Marthe's brothers