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

- 407 -
liberated from "Numbers and rows and series - the
nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought
and pure time... " (450). And, escaping from time and
its changes, they also, for a few seconds, escape
death. Loving and knowing each other completely,
they virtually become one, thus also overcoming the
opposites and dualities which exist in what we term
"reality".
82
Van and Ada experience "nowness" and "reality" -
rea1ity, that is, which has lost its quotes
and which Nabokov calls "true reality".. Ada may not
be just playing on words when she says, "I know
there's a Van in Nirvana" (583).
The experiences of exaltation and insight into
"true reality" are transient. They fill one timeless
moment; they may be repeated, but they cannot be made
to last and are followed by a speedy return to normality.
"This cannot be taken away, can it? " says
Ada at one such moment, but it is. After one moment
of captured "nowness", time - normal time with all
its
implications
- reasserts itself, and Ada and Van
cannot escape from it, just as they cannot escape
from the "real" world closing in on them after their
periods of bliss at Ardis, their paradise. Van revolts
against suffering and "fanatically denounced the
existence of physical pain in all worlds" (137) and
indulges in a passionate outburst when Ada suggests
that they visit Krolik's grave in the churchyard:
"You know I abhor churchyards, I despise, I denounce
death, dead bodies are burlesque... " (297), but they