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

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is blind where his wife and Franz are concerned, and
this gives rise to a number of ironic situations,
described in detail by Jürgen Bodenstein.
144
To give
only a few examples out of the many: Dreyer is pleased
to find, for example, that his wife is smiling "fairly
often of late", and he mistakenly puts this down to
the fact that she is happy with him. Actually Martha
smiles because she intends to seduce young Franz, and
"was in the pleasant position of a person who has
been promised a mysterious treat in the near future"(62).
Leaving for a skiing trip, Dreyer encourages his wife
to "Have a good time over the holidays" and "Tell Franz
to take you to the theatre" (148), without realizing
that there is no need for such encouragement at all.
He is the victim of false appearances on many other
occasions, as for example, when he returns from his
trip and experiences "perfect happiness" because
"there was a magnificent smile on Martha's face" (160).
However, it is not a smile of welcome; she smiles
because "wise fate... had so simply and honestly
averted a crude, ridiculous, dreadfully overworked
disaster" (160), namely that of Dreyer surprising
her and Franz together in his own bedroom.
All these and many other examples145 joyfully
exploit a stock comedy-situation and its consequences,
and may in this novel not have any profound implications.
However, they do anticipate, even though in a comic
guise, the implications of later novels, such as
The Eye, Pnin, Lolita, and The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, all of which centre round the question whether