SOURCE: “The Gliding Eye: Nabokov's Marvelous Terror,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter, 1999, pp. 162-74.

In the following essay, Morris explores Nabokov's technique of using the play of consciousness as the narrative voice.

Vladimir Nabokov, according to a reliable source present at his bedside, was chronically unable to fall asleep, or to sleep through the night. “I suffocate in uninterrupted, unbearable darkness,” goes an early poem. “The marvelous terror of consciousness rocks my soul in emptiness.”

The affliction was often worth enduring. It helped engender seventeen novels, including such triumphs as The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Transparent Things; a memoir of great beauty, Speak, Memory; the magisterial Eugene Onegin translation and annotation; dozens of artful stories; and a slim but precious sheaf of poems. The curse or blessing of sleeplessness was life-long. Fifty-five years after first describing his “marvelous...