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

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361
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He speculates about time in much the same way as
Nabokov himself and other Nabokov characters. Like
Van Veen, for example, and Mr. R. he denies the exist-
ence of the future: "... the basic element of the
future... is its complete non-existence" (BS, 39).
Like Nabokov himself and like Van Veen, he abhors
the thought of the eternal nothingness after life:
My intelligence does not accept the transformation
of physical discontinuity into
the permanent continuity of a non-physical
element escaping the obvious law, nor can
it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable
treasures of thought and sensation,
and thought-behind-thought and sensation-behind-sensation,
to lose them all at
once and forever in a fit of black nausea
followed by infinite nothingness (BS, 87-88).
This, it is true, is followed by the remark "Unquote"
(BS, 88), but it fits in with Krug's other ideas on
the
same theme.
The quotation just used in connection with Invita-
tion to a Beheading continues on a much less confident
and optimistic note:
.. * death is either the instantaneous gaining
of perfect knowledge... or absolute nothingness,
nichto (BS, 155-156),
and it seems that it is this idea as much as his con-
Crete sorrows that drives Krug mad, or rather, induces
the author to take pity on him and cause instantaneous
madness. Unlike the artists, unlike, also, Cincinnatus
C., the philosopher sees no way out of the prison of
this world and out of the prison of time, and he sees
no way of coping with and overcoming death:
Krug could take aim at a flock of the most
popular and sublime human thoughts and bring
down a wild goose any time. But he could not
kill death.