ife, with all other characters, and especially women, peripheral to his central role. This male is condemned from the first:
So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left . . . has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meagre: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and - O horrible! (Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading 12)
Cincinnatus is to be executed for a crime largely unidentified except that it is said he was found guilty of being "a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another" (Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading 24). The novel is not a dour one, though, for the world in which Cincinnatus finds himself is not as threatening as all this may sound. He is the one fully developed human being in this world, faced with the vagaries and absurdities of his cardboard jailers and others in his vision of a life.
The fact that Cincinnatus is an artist trying to express himself in the pages of a novel is made over and over as he seeks just the right word and never finds it. He seems to know that nothing will come of the tale he is trying to tell, but he is impelled to try to tell it anyway. The male as artist shapes the world, and he is indeed expected to do so and so may feel compelled as Cincinnatus seems to be to create and express even in the face of imminent death. Cincinnatus is more human than those around him because he has a dual world, the supposedly real world in which we all live, and the second world he creates in his mind and to which only he has access except to the degree that he can admit others through his writings. For Cincinnatus, the world he creates is not a reflection of the world he knows but of the world he wants to know or remembers from some earlier time in his life. He associates this world with the innocence o...