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

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clear, and the harmony and the meaning of the world
may be revealed, and with these insights comes the
"consciousness of the oneness of everything".
V's experience is of this nature. As he sits
listening to what he thinks is Sebastian's breathing,
feeling "a sense of security, of peace, of wonderful
relaxation" (189-190), his mind makes the "sudden
leap". To put it in his own words: "the iron ring"
bursts, and he is rid of what he calls "the close-
fitting dream of one's own personality", the obstacle
to true knowledge and the barrier between persons.
"The only real number is one"; there is a unity
of "All in One and One in All". The sudden awareness
of this must be the root of V's astonishing statement
that "I am Sebastian". It opens the way out of "the
solitary confinement of his own self" (43), to which
even Sebastian, when young, thought he was condemned,
for it implies the sudden realization that there can
in fact be no barrier between people's souls and
selves, because they are all (one's own self in-
cluded) parts of that Oneness:
... as we penetrate towards the true spiritual
essence of individuals, the things
which can be fully shared increase, and the
things which cannot be shared decrease.
When the limit is reached, when the root of
"I" is experienced, as in the profoundest
mystical experience, the overwhelming discovery
is made that the root6Qf "I" is
united to all other "i's"... 7
4.
With this truth revealed to him V transcends his own
mind and personality and becomes one with Sebastian,
obtaining true knowledge of him.
Sebastian is dead, but this does not change any-