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

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passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment"
(252). Van sharing a number of his father's talents
and his "demon blood" (20), there exists between them
a relation of mutual love, which in Van takes the form
of "adoration" which remains unchanged even in his
very old age (237). Apart from these moments, however,
Demon is conspicuous only for his innumerable affairs
and his immorality, shared again by Van.
The only somewhat "human" figure to emerge is
Lucette. But though she plays such a great part in the
story, and though Van thinks of her as "fantastically
intricate" (471), even her description is limited to
only a few aspects of her personality. One of them
is expressed in the adjectives applied to her: "neutral"
(36), "guileless" (127), "tidy" (203), "poor"
(280), "trustful" (281), "naive", "patient" (378),
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"loyal", "simple" (415). The other aspect is her love
for Van, which, as it is hopeless, plunges her into
loneliness and despair, makes her life dull and empty
and blank, and in the end drives her to commit suicide.
The stylisation is carried further by a conspicuous
pattern of colours, interpreted as symbolically
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significant by Bobbie Ann Mason. Ada is mostly seen:
in black and white, sometimes in black. Lucette, whose
colour is green (e. g. 64,280,410,414) later sometimes
takes to Ada's black (367,460), and for her suicide
dresses in black and yellow (492). These are the same
colours that Aqua wears for her suicide; that Ada is
wearing when Van leaves her on discovering her infidelity
(295), and they are also the colours of Ada's