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

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198 -
thing. V has an insight that Sebastian did not reach
in The Doubtful Asphodel. For Sebastian "the asphodel66
on the other shore is as doubtful as ever" (168-169).
He sees no way of stepping beyond the bar put up by
death. A person dies and takes his soul and his secret
along with him. "The man is dead and we do not
know" (168). For V death has lost its grim finality.
Once he has obtained knowledge of Sebastian, even.
death cannot take that knowledge from him. Sebastian
is dead, but he lives on in V, for his soul and V's
have become one. And equally, V implies, death may
not be final for anyone, it may not mean complete extinction.
Striving to know others' souls, thus making
them one's own, one may live on in them after one's
own physical
death:
I have learnt
...
one secret too, and
namely: that the soul is but a manner
of being - not a constant state - that
any soul may be yours, if you find and
follow its undulations. The hereafter
may be the full ability of consciously
living in any chosen soul, in any number
of souls, all of them unconscious
of their interchangeable burden (191-
192).
He has found Sebastian's soul, and thus Sebastian
lives on, and, perhaps unknown to him, there live
in V the souls of others as well: "I am Sebastian,
or Sebastian is I. or perhaps we both are someone
whom neither of us knows" (192).
The fact that V was listening to the breathing
of
another and not of Sebastian, does not impair the
genuineness of his experience, in its depth and quality,
because this breathing was merely the factor that