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

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who in turn kept pushing him away -
he was preventing them from listening
(IB, 91-92).
The conversation seems to proceed slowly, there
seem to be long stretches of silence. Again one is
tempted to compare the effects of this with those of a
Pinter play. Here as there, the slow movement of the
action and the long pauses stress on the one hand the
meaninglessness and the triviality of a gesture or of
a'phrase, and on the other hand seem to endow the same
gesture and phrase with a new burden of meaning. This
is disturbing and disquieting, as it is impossible to
find out what that meaning is. Thus, almost imperceptibly,
the dream that seemed purely nonsensical and
comic at the beginning, becomes gradually more and
more
oppressive.
For Cincinnatus, the whole occasion is indeed a
nightmare, reflecting what torments and depresses him.
Marthe is the only person in the world whom he loves,
even though she has been unfaithful to him ever since
they got married. In a world where he finds no one
who is like him, no one to whom he can talk, and no one
who understands him, because "there is in the world
not a single human who can speak my language; or, more
simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even
more simply, not a single human" (IB, 85), he is hoping
that one day some kind of beautiful relation may be
established between himself and Marthe, that she may
be the person to help him out of his isolation:
And afterwards - perhaps most of all afterwards
-I shall love you, and one day we
shall have a real, all-embracing explanation,