Julian Connolly writes:

 

Brian's commentary on H. G. Wells's "The Plattner Story" made me think that Wells's work may have left traces in another Nabokov novel, The Eye. The narrator becomes something of a "Watcher of the Living" after he supposedly shoots himself and begins to observe the newcomer Smurov. In describing how his consciousness continues to work after death, he writes that he now knew "that a sinner's torment in the afterworld consists precisely in that his tenacious mind cannot find peace until it manages to unravel the complex consequences of his reckless terrestrial actions" (23). Cf. "we may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we have laid" in the Wells's story.