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

- 47 -
and to what degree, people can really know each other.
Dreyer knows neither Franz nor Martha. He has labelled
Franz, and Franz will remain for him "an amusing
coincidence in human form" (106). He files him away
in his mind under "'cretin' with cross references
to 'milksop' and 'sympathisch''' (169).
Martha remains a stranger to him even though he
has lived with her for over seven years. He knows
her so little that she can make all sorts of cruel
plans to abolish him without raising his suspicion.
In fact, after he has visited an exhibition of crime
and has looked at photographs of murderers and their
victims and all the appalling instruments of murder,
he comes home, and looking at Franz and Martha, who
have been plotting his murder for weeks, "felt a
pleasant relief at seeing at last two familiar, two
perfectly normal faces" (209). His former mistress,
Erica knows very well what Dreyer'"s weakness is:
Oh, I can just see what you do with your
wife. You love her and don't notice her.
You love her - oh, ardently - and don't
bother what she's like inside. You kiss
her and still don't notice her (175).
People in the later novels label those with whom they
live and file them away in their minds, never getting
to know them more than superficially. Humbert Humbert
loves Lolita "ardently" and still does not "notice"
her.
Without trying to stretch things too far and to
burden the "gayest"146 of Nabokov's novels with a
metaphysical meaning, one might say that even in its
comical guise Martha's experience foreshadows the