 As he departs, he suffers a fatal stroke.The narrator, however, assures that Pilgram has achieved a state of happiness where he is visiting all the places he ever dreamt of and seeing “all the glorious bugs he had longed to see”

While many of Nabokov’s writings refer to butterflies, they achieve their strongest literary treatment in this short story, and in "Speak, Memory", "The Gift", and "".In this case, Pilgram is a dreamer and lives in his inner world, and is eventually overwhelmed by his obsession.