"I cannot agree with you that "Lolita was the real thing"  because I believe,
like Freud, that there is no such "real thing"  except the "real loss" of a
"some-thing" that always haunts every one of us and which Nabokov could render
in such a taunting heartbreaking way in almost all his novels."
Jansey,


Jansey,

I too believe in the real loss of a something that haunts us, but I tend to consider it more in the terms of  Wordsworth, vide 'Intimations of Immortality,', than in a Freudian  sense. I believe that, one day, one regains that portion of one's self, which I think has something to do with what people have called a soul, or that you regain your place in the something-that-was, which is not in this world. This is the way I tend to consider Pale Fire. I think, in an amazing way, Pale Fire is the one novel, one of very few  works of art, that come close to expressing what I FEEL (and I make a strong and deliberate distinction here between what I think and what I feel, since my thoughts tend to reject this) may be the  answer to the puzzle of existence.

Andrew Brown