Vladimir Nabokov's Terra Incognita

In Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Terra Incognita,” Vallière narrates his time in the jungle before his death. The story raises the question of how much reality is affected by imagination, and conversely how imagination is affected by reality. The title itself translates to mean “unknown land,” and this land is where Vallière finds himself in before his death. One cannot determine whether or not Vallière’s narrative was real or imaginative because the jungle was his own reality up until the moment of his death. “Terra Incognita” creates a metaphor of life and death as unknown lands that can be interpreted through different perceptions of reality and imagination. In the story Vallière relays an account of his trek through the jungle as it happens; but a few details in his story present the question of whether his account is simply of his imagination. Both viewpoints could be argued, but even in Vallière’s final moments he …show more content…
He often mentions a room that he sees during his journey, although later he thinks the room is a symbol of death. Vallière often sees different parts of a room interfere his vision, “Now and then, on my left (always, for some reason, on my left). . .seemed a large armchair but was actually a strange, cumbersome gray amphibian” (296). The armchair is the one constant that does not change in Vallière’s visions; he always sees it in the same place, the same color, and the same form. Not only does the room appear in his hallucination with “a few pieces of realistic furniture and four walls,” but he also recalls strange things happening to Cook’s tattoo. If this was to called a reality there would not be a tattoo suspended in midair and floating. But, this could also be explained by Vallière’s sickness that he is facing. Some parts of Vallière’s story are fake, and some are real, but those parts cannot be distinguished because no one has the narrator’s same state of