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

- 44 -
Martin's mother of her son's disappearance, momentar-
ily "becomes" Martin, so to speak, as he leaves her
and conjures up an image of Martin walking into
"Zoorland" from where he will not return:
Darwin emerged from the brown depths of
the melancholy garden, closed the wicket
behind him... and started back along the
path through the woods. It
...
was quiet
in the woods, all one could hear was a
faint gurgle: water was running somewhere
under the wet gray snow... The air was
dingy, here and there tree roots traversed
the trail, black fir needles now
and then brushed against his shoulder,
the dark path passed between the trunks
in picturesque and mysterious windings
(205).
Certainly, it is a long way from here to the com-
plexities of later novels, but Glory is partly a
first venture into the exploration of the pattern
underlying the life of man, which is not, as Luzhin,
Shade and Kinbote, and finally Mr. R. are to find out,
a sequence of haphazard incidents and coincidences,
but which, on close examination, and seen through the
eyes of an artist, will be discovered to be well
ordered, planned and determined by an underlying
"web of sense".
King, Queen, Knave
40
.
this "bright brute"'141, as
Nabokov calls his second novel, reads simply like a
story of the love triangle, with Franz, the innocent,
coming from the provinces to Berlin and 4being seduced
by his much older aunt who also talks him into plans
of murdering her unloved husband, Kurt Dreyer. None
of the three characters has much depth: the title of
the novel itself is an allusion to their cardboard