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

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Hugh Person ignores a vague feeling that tells him
that he had better leave Witt there and then, and
that very night dies in the flames when his own hotel
burns
down.
Again, then, as in The Defence and Pale Fire it
appears that life is not simply a series of unrelated
and haphazard coincidences. A number of thematically
linked incidents and moments emerge from Hugh's life
and form a very clear design, Shade's "web of sense",
which suggests that some intelligent power (or powers)
must be at work, planning, ordering and organizing.
"Everyone can sort out convenient patterns of related
themes in the past development of his life",
10,
Nabokov says in an interview
but it appears in
Transparent Things that this is not really something
that "everyone" can do. Hugh has been seen to fail,
and the reason is that he is not an artist. With his
vision limited to the surface of things, to the immediately
perceptible reality in which he lives, and
to the surface events of his life, such repetitions
as the author has uncovered, escape him and he is
quite unaware of the mysterious connections which
exist between separate incidents, and quite incapable
of interpreting their meaning. It takes an artistic
mind to see through the mere surface of a life, to
see the design shining through it and to, uncover and
recreate it through the medium of art. Nabokov admits
as much in Speak, Memory. Talking of his own life he
says that it has "a certain intricate watermark whose
unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is