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

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or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a
rift in the texture of space"; he is "hampered... by...
confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris and col-
lapsing colossuses", and finally "blocked by masses
of rubbish, and that was death" (60). He also suffers
from "'avalanche' nightmares at the rush of awakening"
bringing along with them a total confusion of words
and images and mental concepts (60).
Despite the injections, R. feels the pain (the
first terrible and undeniable sign of impending death)
...
always present behind the wall of my
flesh like the muffled thunder of a permanent
avalanche which obliterates there,
beyond me, all the structures of my imagination,
all the landmarks of my conscious
self (84).
To both their minds death presents itself in images
of destruction and chaos, matter descending upon them
like an avalanche and burying them. It seems, then,
that what R. is experiencing in full consciousness
corresponds exactly to Hugh's dream visions. Yet: Hugh
is "finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and that was
death. " In other words, his dreams represent death to
him as a purely physical thing, and it is physical
fear only that he experiences: "the crude anguish of
physical death" (104). All the deaths in the novel,
onstage and off, seem to justify him, for they dispose
of the characters in crude enough ways. "... Person
Senior... felt a roaring redness fill his head. He
died before reaching the floor, as if falling from
some great height... " (14-15). Another girl, besides
Armande, gets strangled - in an aside, as it were,