Ch. 7, sec. 1
“When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed housefronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a twofold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city, with its toylike trams and linden trees and brick walls, enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passer-by who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses” (143-144).
In this passage (no pun intended), Nabokov gives us a glimpse of his writerly personality– “putting myself in the place of some passer-by–” while also commenting on the larger ideas of perspective, both in the sense of scale and in the sense of varying consciousnesses. The extreme closeness of the train, which “all but grazed housefronts and shop signs” and from which he “saw a city, with its toylike trams” provides the sense of scale, with Nabokov and the train being the larger, the foregrounded, so to speak, items. At this point in the passage, the perspective changes, and where Nabokov’s “twofold excitement” exists– one, the image of the town reflecting off the mirrors and windows of the train: “I saw a city... enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side”, thus transferring, reflecting, Nabokov’s consciousness to that of the “passer-by” viewing the train from the ground, part two. Moreover, the paragraph itself, formally, reflects this mirroring. The first and final sentences are longer than the two in the middle and provide the most detail with respect to the two (really one divided, doubled, mirrored, halved, etc.) viewing consciousnesses. The two different perspectives also share a point in time, witnessing the same event unfold. In terms of Lolita, the theme of doubling, of characters having a special relationship to other characters crops up frequently, e.g. Humbert and Quilty.
