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

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liquid in vessels of various shapes and sizes "could
be made even and just either by grading the contents
or by eliminating the fancy vessels and adopting a
standard size" (BS, 66). Inspired furthermore by a
series of cartoons about the Etermon (Everyman)
couple, who supposedly demonstrate the whole bliss of
the average life of an average couple, Paduk founds
the Party of the Average Man. Happiness can be attained
only, he says, by following a pattern of life similar
to that of the Etermons. But above all, he insists,
bliss and "total joy" (BS, 65) can be attained only
by completely renouncing one's personality and identity,
". by weeding out all such arrogant notions as the
community does not and should not share", "by-letting
[one's]
person dissolve in the virile oneness of
the State", in short, by becoming like everybody else,
by becoming "interchangeable" (BS, 86). These theories
he enforces as laws, ruthlessly eliminating the
"fancy vessels", those persons who fail to comply.
It is in just such a world as this that Cincinnatus
C. in Invitation to a Beheading finds himself in
prison, and for precisely the reasons that would have
brought him there in the world of Bend Sinister. For
Cincinnatus' crime consists in his having a mind
that is different from everybody else's and is therefore
incomprehensible to those around him. In a world
where people understand each other "at the first
word" (IB, 22) because they think and talk only in
commonplace and sober terms, he remains a mystery,
for he has "words that would end in an unexpected way,