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

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349
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the river we see him fishing in is not a river at all:
it is waterless, and he fishes "for non-existent fish"
in it (IB, 200).
The effect of such sober comment and analysis is
a comic one of alienation, deflation and disillusion.
One cannot possibly take what one sees seriously. It
cannot be taken for a real world in the sense described
above, i. e. a world that can be believed in and
accepted on its own terms, one of which one would
willingly be a part and whose laws one would be willing
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to accept and respect. That which tried to make us
believe in its own independent existence and reality
is exposed as being no more than a very poor example
of a theatrical production in which our own world is
imitated, and in which even this imitation goes
pathetically
wrong.
But while to the reader the world of the novel
looks like a cheap imitation of our world, Cincinnatus
actually sees our very world in the terms that have
been described. It is our world and our life that
appear to him like a bad theatrical production or
"performance", and like an imitation of that ideal
reality of which he has always had an intuitive
knowledge; a bad imitation, too, no more, in fact,
than a "clumsy copy" of his ideal realm. It is rid-*
iculously hideous, cheap and primitive in` its unsuccessful
attempt to copy that realm; all the tricks it
uses are easily seen through; its people are no more
than "dummies" (IB, 130), "rag dolls" (IB, 51) and
parodies - even children, even Cincinnatus' wife,