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

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do not conceal them must die. It is thus that in
Bend Sinister, which deals more concretely with
political themes31 than Invitation to a Beheading,
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the nightmare gets out of control. "Krug is subjected
to very literal harassment and shut away in
a very material prison"33, and is destroyed.
Exactly the same thing seems to happen in
Invitation to a Beheading. Cincinnatus is at the
end taken to the block, he lies down, spreads out
his arms, and the shadow of the swing of the executioner's
axe is "already running along the boards"
(IB, 206). Yet Invitation to a Beheading has been
described as an "optimistic" novel in comparison
with the "pessimistic" Bend Sinister.
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The
solution
of this apparent contradiction lies in the fact,
already mentioned above, that the basic concern of
Invitation to a Beheading is not of a political but
of a metaphysical nature. Cincinnatus feels imprison-
ed not in one particular state, but in this world
and in this life whose reality he doubts, which he
sees measured by man-made time ("... every hour
the watchman washes off the old hand and daubs on
a new one" on the blank dial of the prison clock
[IB, 122]) and at the end of which there is death,
although its exact hour is horribly uncertain. Thus
it becomes clear that the account of Cincinnatus'
imprisonment cannot be taken literally, and that it
is, as Field says, "an enactment of the aphorism...
'the world as a prison'. "35
All those scenes, then, in which unaccountably and