The article revisits the question of the narrator’s role in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to а Beheading. Taking on the problem of authorial voice in the text, I examine the cases of direct address of ‘the author-in-the-text’ to the protagonist, evaluating different theories regarding the relationship between the narrator, the protagonist and the author in Nabokov’s poetics. I also discuss the function of the motif of the dream in the texture of the novel, and especially focus on one of the intertexts, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is closely connected to the interpretation of the denouement of the novel.