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

- 38-9 -
"Don't forget normal adultery" (442).
Paradise, or what deranged minds mistook for it,
does not exist, for (Anti) Terra is hell. Nor do some
of the glimpses that Van allows the reader of the
hereafter give rise to any hope that a better place
may follow this "evil world" (301). Dan has only a
dim vision of the hereafter as "the torture house of
eternity" (435), but Van's ideas are more specific.
Death, he knows, cannot be the end of everything:
The mind of man, by nature a monist,
cannot accept two nothings; he knows
there has been one nothing, his biological
inexistence in the infinite
past, for his memory is utterly blank,
and that nothingness, being, as it
were, past, is not too hard to endure.
But a second nothingness - which perhaps
might not be so hard to bear
either -
is logically unacceptable.
... we simply cannot expect a second
nothing, a second void, a second blank
(314).
What he imagines as following life is perhaps harder
to face than this second "impossible" nothingness
and blank, for it is nothing less than a continuation
of the unhappiness and pain of life, experienced
through some form of "disorganized consciousness"
(314). To dying Mr Rack he says (mercifully only in
thought): "... the only consciousness that persists in
the hereafter is the consciousness of pain" (315),
and he foresees for him
...
tiny clusters of particles still ,
retaining Rack's personality, gathering
here and there in the here-andthere-after,
clinging to each other,
somehow, somewhere, a web of Rack's
toothaches here, a bundle of Rack's
nightmares there - (315).
...
He sees Lucette's death as followed by an eternity