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

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sight and which his mind cannot penetrate. The present
condition of things, their immediate reality, is the
only reality he perceives. Their former appearance
and reality, and even his own memories of them, are
lost to him.
Just as with things, Hugh registers only the most
obvious and superficial thin veneer of his own life,
namely its concrete events and incidents. He cannot
see through them, and whatever significance they
might have remains concealed from him. When he first
comes to Witt, he strolls about the place, and among
the exhibits in a souvenir store notices "a wooden
plate with a central white cross surrounded by all
twenty-two cantons" and wonders whether he should
buy it for his college roommate. "Hugh, too, was
twenty-two and had always been harrowed by coincident
symbols", the author comments (13). But of course this
is one of those superficial and very obvious coincidences
which fit into the "thin veneer of immediate
reality". He does not see the symbolic coincidences
of his own life, or, to be precise, he is not aware
of their symbolic significance. It is left to the
author to reveal it by making Hugh's life transparent.
To do this, he does not follow the complicated
method described above. There are a few instances
when he seems tempted to do so, or at least hints that
he might do so if he wished, but he checks himself
each time and returns to Hugh because he is his main
concern. Nabokov adopts a method which he hints at
in his own autobiographical works. "To describe the