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

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author frees the reader's mind and enables him to
look at things in a new way, without being hampered
by the traditional ideas these forms have all along
imposed upon him.
"Parody serves to startle the reader into an awareness
that his comfortable notions of fiction and
'reality' are about to be exploded. "122 It is thus
that his eyes are opened to the novels' basic theme -
the quest for reality - and it is thus, too, that
he is startled into an awareness of the "true reality"
the author has discovered through his art and uncovered
for the reader in his art. The author cannot actually
bring the reader face to face with the "true
reality" he, as artist,. perceives, but he can at
least bring him face to face with his artistic version
of what he perceives.
Sometimes, however, he has to stop short even of
this. Nabokov admits that much when, as in Ada and
Transparent. Things the characters' experiences are
hinted at rather than articulated, and he admits as
much about himself. His characters' preoccupations
are largely his own. This becomes clear from his
statements about the enigmatic nature of reality
quoted earlier in this Introduction; he is fascinated
by patterns in his own life123 like some of his char-
acters, and, like Van Veen, he is preoccupied with
timel24 and death
125,
and shares to a degree Van's
conception of time126. And it seems that he must have
had experiences of the nature described for example
in Transparent Things: experiences that have given