Carolyn wrote: "Sans wine,
sans song, sans singer, sans end." Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat.
Tom Rymour [ Glad to her from ya!]: Willie
Woggledagger's seventh age of man: "...sans eyes, sans teeth, sans
everything."
Jerry Friedman: The "sans"es suggest the "All the world's
a stage" speech from /As You Like It/.
Mary
Krimmel: "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans
taste, sans everything." is Jacques's description of the seventh age of man
in Shakespeare's "As You Like It". Surely others will answer the question below.
Note that Jacques's fourth "sans" is "everything" and Kinbote's fourth is
"anything but his art". What a difference!
Carolyn Kunin brought a
quote from the Rubaiyat. And yet, the predominant reference
here points to Jacques in "As You Like It".
If Kinbote's "sans fame,
sans future, sans audience,
sans anything but his art" suggests a
redemption through art (even if "sans audience") then his
pompous grandeur wouldn't end in suicide because defeat
would only have come to him as "a figment", not as a
"character".
The spirit of John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" (Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate
men,/ And dost with poison, war, and sickness
dwell;And poppy or charms can make us sleep as
well/And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou
then?/One short sleep past, we wake
eternally,/And death shall be no more; Death,
thou shalt die..") is not absent from the novel's closing lines. This
pauline defiance fits well in Kinbote's certainty that
Shade's line 1000 is a return to line
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