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

- 311 -
When he meets Felix at Tarnitz, he feels for a second
that he has been mistaken:
For a moment I had the impression that it
had all been a delusion, a hallucination
that never could he have been my double...
-
For a moment, as I say, he appeared to
as like me as any man (84).
me
But, as he says, his doubts never last longer than
a moment, and then "... I saw, once again, the marvel
that had arrested me five months before" (84). He ig-
nores what his own eyes tell him, namely, that the
resemblance is by no means perfect. He notices that
their ears are slightly different, their hands, the
colours of their eyes; "I possess large yellowish
teeth; his are whiter and set more closely together,
but is that really important? " (27) In the name of
art he ignores the details that interfere with his de-
sign, all "those trifling discrepancies... which have
no importance whatever in the sum of an artist's
success" (204).
Never, not even at the end, does he realize what
his principal mistake has been. He believes that his
masterpiece has been destroyed by a minor mistake,
namely, his failure to remove Felix's stick and there-
by the means of establishing the dead man's identity.
He blames the reporters for destroying his masterpiece
by
[hurling]
...
themselves upon such small
and quite immaterial blemishes as would,
given a deeper and einer attitude towards
my masterpiece, pass unnoticed, the way
a beautiful book is not in the least impaired
by a misprint or a slip of the pen
(202).