Nabokov's "Symbols and Signs"

I found this story to be intriguing because I felt like Nabokov was leading up to the climax of the story. Would the couple's son commit suicide with success?  Would they get him out of the sanitarium?  What was going to happen?  All of this rising action and suspense leaves the reader with a rather shocking conclusion:  the phone rang twice and both times it was a girl looking for a boy named Charlie.  The phone rings a third time and the story ends.

While I feel like I could delve into many possibilities and play with numerous explanations for the story, I wish to focus on Nabokov's style of writing.  Throughout the story, Nabokov gives great detail in just a few pages that lends the reader insight to these characters' lives and their surroundings.  From the opening sentence alone, I was immediately intrigued and excited to read on.  Nabokov excellently portrays a sense of mystery:  "For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind." Who is this young man? What incurable derangement of the mind is he suffering?  This kind of sentence is artful and persuasive in that it immediately hooks the reader in.

Nabokov's skill for writing becomes immediately apparent when he describes the illness the son suffers, a disease called referential mania.  "With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being."  Instead of simply stating that referential mania is a mental disorder in which the sufferer believes that everything around him is telling him something, Nabokov writes these beautiful sentences to explain how the son thinks.  The idea that "the great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up ... the ultimate truth of his being" gives greater impact to the disorder and gives the reader a concise image of what the son experiences.

Characterization throughout the story was strong.  I found the description of Mrs. Sol to be quite depictive:  "... Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers."  From this sentence alone, I could easily imagine this woman. The "cluster of brookside flowers" is an interesting image that conveys much about this woman's personality, even if she is just a side-character in this story.