''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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ance which is all the ordinary ("average") mind per-
ceives, and helps the reader penetrate it with him.
Pnin anticipates much that will have to be discussed
in connection with other novels. As they will be seen
to do, it changes in the very process of being read.
And as it changes, it becomes clear that the misunder-
standings concerning the narrator and the criticism
of him are brought about by a rather too close adher-
ence to the simple factual information the novel pro-
vides and by a neglect of its implications, that is by
a more or less automatic reaction to its surface.
It is true that the comic Pnin is rather.
_prominent
at first and that it seems tactless to expose what
simply looks like his comic eccentricity and all his
comic misadventures. It is equally true that the nar-
rator sometimes rather seems to overstep the bounds
of simple truth and to wander off into fiction. How-
ever, it has by now turned out that it is not really
Pnin who is exposed to ridicule but the general modern
automatic approach to all aspects of life which results
in a superficial knowledge of things and bars the way
to an understanding of their real quality and nature]
which fails to see and accept people as they are
because it wants and reacts to machines rather than
to live and real human beings.
What the narrator gives us may not be the "true"
4.
story of Pnin's life, nor the "true" Pnin, but his
artistic versions of both are more rea1 than what
the "communal eye" perceives. The question posed at
the beginning, namely, whether the depiction
and under-