ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a kind of prolegomena to the large-scale transition from the Cold War to the War on Terror. One of the most exasperated readers in Cold War America was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Senator McCarthy was trying to find Communists living secretly within, and in his view working against, the United States. Bend Sinister is a novel about discipline that adopts discipline's discourse. The privilege against self-incrimination is much broader than it appears, due to the rule Black invokes with the phrase "chain of evidence". Where in Bend Sinister, it seems that "the police state, or communism, is trying to turn the globe into five million square miles of terror, and stupidity, and barbed wire", in Pnin it is everyday inhospitality that abounds. Finally, chapter concludes how Vladimir Nabokov registers the logic of signature to the logic of password transition by relocating his fiction from public space to the space of the home.
