Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and--O horrible!

Everything has duped me as it fell into place, everything. This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw. I have discovered it. I have discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast--how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense...it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in--ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all-the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration--no, again I am off the track--all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. Oh, if only I had known that I was yet to remain here for such a long time, I would have begun at the beginning and gradually, along a high road of logically connected ideas, would have attained, would have completed, my soul would have surrounded itself with a structure of words....Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of...

To finish writing something, whispered Cincinnatus half questioningly but then he frowned, straining his thoughts, and suddenly understood that everything had in fact been written already.

I realized in reading Invitation to a Beheading that John Barth's Floating Opera has the same basic element: the agony of an imminent but postponed demise. Death lurking around the corner. But where Barth was on the whole whimsical or at least sarcastic, Nabokov is downright evil. Every time I encounter his work I get the distinct feeling he is reaching into my mind and attempting to make things into mush there.
Invitation to a Beheading should terrify you. If it doesn't that probably means you are transparent and not real like Cincinnatus. Be careful.