In a former posting https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?...  I reconsider Kinbote's words ("...a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars") under the light of Kafka's little parables, before suggesting that "Lolita's 'caged artistic ape' and Humbert Humbert's prison bars give shape to the pedophile's tragic dimension, should we accept the hypothesis that Humbert Humbert's cage is his personality" and that we may look at Pale Fire's Hazel Shade standing outside the azure entrance of a bar with its neon-barred puddles (lines 397-400) to understand that this instance "serves to emphasize the hopelessness of her romantic situation and how emprisioned she feels by her 'Hazelhood'."  Andrew Field's "Nabokov: His Life in Art", chp. 5, p.142 and 148 (1967) adds another dimension to the image of a "cage," when he stops at "Eden" while traversing Nabokov's short-story A Guidebook to Berlin. He notes that the "image of the zoo and the cage, both figurative and real, is one that is to be recurrent in Nabokov's prose and poetry." and adds that the "actual description of the zoo is not as fascinating as the narrator's perversely anti-romantic admiration of the zoo, which he sees as being as close to a model of heaven as man is capable of creating: 'It's just a pity that this is an artificial paradise, all in bars, but it's true that, were there no barriers, the lion would devour the doe'."

In another story, Music, it's the actual saloon and concert which are felt at first to be "a constricting prison where they were  both held by sounds and had to sit opposite one another at a distance of six to eight meters" before Viktor Ivanovich understands that, instead of a prison, the situation represented "in reality unbelievable happiness, a magical glass bubble which had formed over and enclosed him and her, giving him the opportunity to breath as one with her."

Andrew Field concludes that "Nabokov understands the cage in much the same way as the poet Blok understood it - as the dual metaphor of artistic form and human fate."  

 

I'm beginning to disagree about the validity of the more obvious conclusions that are obtainable when this comparative procedure is applied to some of Nabokov's metaphors and analogies. Like the impossibility of visualising Nabokov's (very unsubstantial) intervals, slits, fissures or cracks of light when they are related to life and to time.  In Bend Sinister: "An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness,"  there's a non-barred shiny puddle that reflects the sky.set inside a wall black dampness. Cages, mirrors, puddles may kill those who are enticed into a "nether sky" (as it happens with the waxwing in Pale Fire, or serve to announce a death as it occurs to Hazel Shade), or they may serve as necessary illusions protected by the limits of a bubble of happiness, or as an epiphanic vision of life and more...

 

...a lot more to contrast, for example, with the lines from a Sirin poem ("Easter") published shortly after his father's assassination, quoted by Field on p.60:

Here we see a "radiant cloud, a brilliant roof in the distance like a mirror..." that holds up to the poet "a quivering call, a most sweet 'arise,'  a great 'bloom' - then in this song, in this glitter, you do live!" (and I see also a symphonic collection of dead & living waxwing, Shade, Hazel, together with an illusion of infinity, happiness, pain, loss...)