The Enchanter post # 2

In the book The Enchanter, Nabokov reveals one of the many things that makes him such a fabulous writer, which is his sophisticated take on conveying the emotions of the main character. Something I find really impressive is how, even though The Enchanter is written in third person, he can describe so vividly what the main character is experiencing...not through describing emotion and thought in a straightforward sense, but through the sounds and sights that he hears.

"He dared not kiss those angular nipples, those long toes with their yellowish nails. His eyes returned from everywhere else to converge on the same suedelike fissure, which seemed to come alive under his prismatic stare." pg.72

In this passage Nabokov states the will of the protagonist and what it is he looks at...no direct descriptions on how he is feeling, yet through descriptive language of what he "dare not" do, and how he sees the girl, is what makes it clear. It's the way he describes the girl that conveys the layers of his emotions. From this passage I see frustration, intense desire, obsession and finally, fear. The character is so afraid of the girl waking up, as well as being caught by an outside person. Yet he is also right in the heat of his fantasy; he is now seizing the opportunity to take advantage of the girl while she sleeps. He describes her body through textures, shapes and sizes. She has become so fetishized by him, that his desire has turned every aspect to her into an object within itself. It is written that the character's eyes "returned from everywhere", alluding to the fact that as he was looking "everywhere"  at her naked body, the way its written "returned" and "converged" hints that his eyes were darting everywhere and then meeting in one place. In my opinion this plays on the idea that his eye movements suggested he had multiple eyes that all met and rested at the "object" he is most obsessed with, which was her vagina. He seems to describe it like he would furniture "suedelike". His nerves also showed in the sense that as he was looking at her vagina, he said it seemed to come alive. The reader knows every slight movement made him afraid and it seems he was so paranoid as well as "enchanted" that he was imagining things.The way he described his stare as "prismatic" also shows his paranoia, hinting that his stare was dissonant and obvious, bright, sharp and loud, that it could also wake her even without his touching her.  These are a few of the many ways Nabokov communicates with his reader in this scene without making any third person observations, he let the actual present scene speak for itself.