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

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each of them. There is Marthe's aged father, with "a
purple blotch of a birthmark on his corded temple,
with a swelling resembling a big raisin right on the
vein" (IB, 90).
Marthe'smaternal grandparents come, "so old that one
could already see through them" (IB, 89); the grandfather
"all shaky and shrivelled, in patched trousers"
(IB, 90), the grandmother, "so slim that she might
have encased herself in a silk umbrella sheath" (IR,
90). Comically, disturbingly, dead members of the
family join this extraordinary gathering: the grandfather
brings "a bulky portrait, in a gilt frame, of
his mother, a misty young woman, in turn holding a
portrait" (IB, 90). Along with the grown-up (and dead)
members of the family, and along with Marthe's ridiculous
brothers, come Marthe's children (who are not
Cincinnatus'); sad little parodies of children: "Lame
Diomedon" (IB, 89), "twisting his whole body in a
rhythmic distortion" (IB, 92), and "obese little
Pauline" (IB, 89), "red-haired, cross-eyed, bespectacled"
(IB, 91), so cross-eyed, that her eyes "seemed
to meet behind the bridge of her nose", and with a
napkin tied around her neck (IB, 91).
These people may be far from matching the rather
awful Lynch family in Beckett's Watt27, but the tendency
in the description and its effect ds a similar
one as there. They are grotesque: They are sad and
tragic in their helpless, shivering and trembling old
age; skinny and transparent, they are also slightly
repulsive. The children are pathetic poor little