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

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seeming coincidences of life lose their quality of
fortuitousness and become significant elements in an
intricate and logical and purposeful pattern, Shade's
"web of sense".
Dillard's second statement has to be modified in
order to become applicable to Nabokov's work. In the
three novels named above he does explore the possibility
of discovering the pattern of fate, but with him
this possibility is not given to everybody. Only the
artist possesses the "creative freedom" of which
Dillard speaks; only he has the gift to understand,
with the help of his art, the workings of fate, and to
see and uncover a purposeful design in what appears
to ordinary mortals as, a confused and mad jumble of
unconnected
coincidences.
In Pale Fire and Transparent Things it is the
writer's art that makes this possible. In Transparent
Things, significantly, the hero himself, a rather
ordinary young man, does not see through the pattern
of his own fate. It is his creator, the artist, who
uncovers this pattern for the reader. In The Defence
it is chess that grants the hero an insight into the
pattern of his life. Chess is for Nabokov certainly
an art form: he refers to it when talking about his
conception of the composition of novels3, and in
The Defence it is shown to have close affinities to
music
4
The three novels also confirm Dillard's third point,
and are joined in this by Despair. They all state with
great definity that it is impossible for man to shape