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

-
358
-
execution, the unreal world around him disintegrates.
When Cincinnatus walks out of his cell, it is no longer
there (IB, 196). The fortress crumbles (IB, 197), and
everything in the town and in the place of the execution
-a poor piece of stage-scenery - comes apart
bit by bit. Trees crash down, the platform eventually
collapses, the executioner dwindles into a tiny larva
(IB, 207).
It is the end of the production which Cincinnatus
insists on acting out (or imagining) that is more difficult
to cope with than anything else. Cincinaatus
is
afraid.
He realized that his fear was dragging him
precisely into the false logic of things
that had gradually developed around him
(IB, 198);
he has come to know and understand that it is all a
masquerade, absurd and unreal, which has no power over
him, and yet he cannot rid himself of this "choking,
wrenching, implacable fear" (IB, 198).
But Invitation to a Beheading does not end on a
note of horror for death is not what Cincinnatus has
been dreading all along. On the contrary, it is on
the point of dying when he is counting to ten, that
he overcomes all fear:
... with a clarity he had never experienced
before
- at first almost painful, so suddenly
did it come, but then suffusing him with
joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I
lying like this? And, having asked himself
these simple questions, he answered them by
getting up and looking around (IB, 207).
He has been "duped" by the common notion of death as
by everything else. Now death
- the execution - is for