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

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tion. Pain and physical death are inescapable, and
the hereafter is a "featureless pseudo-future, blank
and black, an everlasting non-lastingness... " (585).
if it does not in fact contain the horrors that Van
foresaw for Mr Rack, all that imagination can do is
to summon up a mental picture of it which makes it
appear as "a second-rate continuation of our marvel-
ous mortality (586).
Both Van and Ada are dying. In dying, they become
more "one" than ever: "Vaniada" (583). They "overlap,
intergrade, inter. ache"
,
and it does become impossible
"to make out... who exactly survives... " This is the
end they wish for and that they foresee (584).
But there is something to mitigate the horror and
to introduce a new note of hope. Physical death is
inescapable; Van and Ada who experienced moments of
triumph over it, die. But
One can... surmise that if our time-racked,
flat-lying couple ever intended to die
they would die, as it were, into the finished
book,..., into the prose of the book
or the poetry of its blurb (587).
This book contains their own memories, arranged, sty-
lized, shaped, turned into a work of art. And art that
in Nabokov's novels opens man's eyes to things which
normally remain hidden, that unravels problems and
grants insights into mysteries, here becomes a refuge
in the face of death and a means to escape total anni-
hilation. Turning their life and their memories into
a piece of art, Ada and Van give permanence to them.
They create something immortal, and dying "into the
finished book", into their own immortal work of art,
they defy, and triumph over, death.