Death As Metamorphosis

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In a previously unpublished interview from 2006, Lila Azam Zanganeh talked with John Updike, about why he appreciated Nabokov's work:

[I]t’s true there’s a lot of dying, a lot of death in Nabokov. The end of Lolita, almost every character in it is either dead or going to die. But I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin, becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved. [In Nabokov's novel The Eye] ... he describes the transition from life to death. And it’s a kind of metamorphosis rather than a termination.

(Photo by Flickrite Fishgirl7)