The Enchanter's Lost Marbles

                The main character who we follow through Nabokov’s The Enchanter—he who assumes the title of the book—is a man whose perverse desires are driven by a lack of control of his life and the things that surround him. He is a nervous man whose actions seem to be chiefly derived from impulse; a man whose sexual want for a small child is driven by a want to mold and control something tangible—something that he knows he can build and destroy at even the subtlest pang of desire.

                It should be first noted that he is constantly feeling guilty—he knows the feelings he has are sinful and generally looked down upon, though he is constantly “seeking justification for [his] guilt” (6). He is obviously a man who is very hard on himself and aware of the judgments that are passed everyday by countless people around him; people whose judgments he has no control over. He, himself, is judgmental of others—“So what if I have had five or six normal affairs—how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?”—seemingly out of some lack of control over his own love life; one can only assume that these random affairs ended poorly when he values his brief encounters with a child over the relative experience they gave him. He ends up going ahead and marrying the young girl’s mother to get closer to her, of course with no desire for the woman herself, but when he has the subtle thought that she wants to have sex, his mind goes completely awry: “…he could not avoid the conclusion that that very night he was expected to be instrumental in the first infraction of [her] habit [of sleeping alone]” (36).  It is clear that he has some insecurity with his sexuality in general—not only in the instance of his attraction to an adolescent—as he cannot even face the idea of faking his way carnal love to get closer to the young girl.

                Then there is the edenic scene, where he begins to fully unfold his extremely elaborate plans for him and Cordelia’s future, where he will take her away to a remote location in the woods and raise her from a young age in an “eternal nursery,” one where “past, present and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated…from her viviparous lover” (55-57). He wants to create a feeling in her that he is her creator; he is the sole reason for her joy and contentment. Feelings like these in a grown man who has any conscious grip on his confidence and the world around him seem bizarre—it is clear that the Enchanter himself is suffering from severe self-image issues. He feels the world slipping away from him quicker and quicker, resulting in his impulsive death in the end of the novella.