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

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the Future as time (535), but
he had made the mistake one night in 1920
of calculating the maximal number of [his
heart's] remaining beats (allowing for
another half-century), and now the preposterous
hurry of the countdown irritated
him and increased the rate at which he
could hear himself dying (569-570).
He experiences, as a nonagenarian, an "unbelievable
intellectual surge", a "creative explosion" (577),
which enable him to write his memoir, but the consciousness
of his deteriorating health and of inexorably
approaching death becomes ever more acute. At
first it is only the awareness of "furtive, furcating
cracks... in his physical well-being" (569), later it
is a suspicion of some "fatal illness" (570), and this
suspicion is confirmed, almost nonchalantly, by his
referring to his "premature -I mean premonitary -
nightmare about 'You can, Sir, " (583), which points
back to his "'verbal' nightmare" that revealed to him
what Marina was dying of (451). Pain becomes so preva-
lent that it adds a new aspect to Van's concept of
time. It crowds out everything else and eventually be-
comes equated with time:
... an element of pure time enters into
pain, into the thick, steady, solid
duration of I-can't-bear-it pain;...
(587),
or, even more poignant: "... it was high pain for Ada
to be completed" (587).
Thus the memoir that started with an affirmation
of the possibility of bliss even in a world identified
by Van as Hell, and that seemed to open a way of over-
coming the working of time, and, with it, death, is
in danger of ending on a depressing note of resigna-