Nabokov contrasts and parallels the world of insanity and reality using an image of a gifted child and personal success. His cousin, now a famous chess player” (Nabokov n.d.). He writes: “Age six – that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. Using unique images of a gifted child, Nabokov depicts a system of organized and absolute illogic. Nabokov conceives of madness as a struggle for liberation from false attitudes and values, an encounter with primary feelings and impulses that constitutes a possibility for the emergence of the “true self” hidden from the false outer being, whose chief function is an adjustment to the demands of society and the family. Nabokov underlines: “Coinciding with a long convalescence after pneumonia when those little phobias of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened” (Nabokov n.d.). The novel is replete with images of madness, ranging from the universal (the bureaucratized institutions that demand complete conformity, opposed that the distinction between conformity and nonconformity, sanity and insanity, madness and insight, was not always very clear. Conformity and nonconformity, sanity and insanity, madness and insight It is precisely the pathology of madness, a metaphor for the disabling and disorienting threats to individuality inherent in contemporary society. Nabokov unveils that there is a close link between insanity and something strange or fearful that happened in the family many years ago.

“The vein on the side of his bald head where there was a large birthmark stood out conspicuously” (Nabokov n.d.). Nabokov does not retell the story of the family but he points out that there is a mystery about the boy’s birthday and a ‘conspicuous’ birthmark of his father. The boy’s disease, “referential mania”, represents the world of insanity and can be interpreted as a symbol of something strange that happened in the family many years ago. Nabokov uses the world of insanity and unique symbols as the main channels of communication between real and sane worlds.

Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov