Setting

Nabokov presents the narrator's struggles with his wife against the background of the German occupation of France during World War II. Thus, domestic horror is likened to national horror; the bureaucratic problems the narrator has with the "consuls and commissaires'" in obtaining the necessary papers to leave France are likened to the marital problems he faces upon learning of his wife's possible infidelity. The narrator is married in 1940, the same year when the "gentle Germans roared into Paris." As the Nazis bring suffering to everyone in their path, the narrator's wife inflicts tremendous emotional and mental pain upon her husband.

While describing their flight from France, the narrator explains,

the farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his assortment of variously propelled junk—something of which he was a mere symbol...