Nabokov's Essay: Question 3

The biggest example of rhetorical devices I noticed was a very big metaphor: "The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to mop it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain—and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever." In this passage, Nabokov is comparing the adventure of reading a novel to a hike up a mountain. It shows how as the author goes he ""mops up" the chaos and forms it into natural objects. Then once he reaches the top of the mountain, he compares the ending of a book to the writer and reader "spontaneously embracing." This apparently links them forever if the book lasts forever.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Fredson Bowers. "Good Readers and Good Writers."Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print.