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

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THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
The novel which resembles The Eye more closely than any
of the others is The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
1
Like The Eye it deals with the quest for the "true
reality" of a person, as defined at the beginning of
the chapter about that novel, and also with Sebastian's
quest for self-knowledge. The basic formula is essentially
the same as that of the earlier novel: Sebastian,
of whose death we are informed on the second page of
the novel, emerges at the end as its author, just as
the "dead" narrator of The Eye emerges as the very person
he is talking about, so that the experience that
both Smurov and Sebastian go through might be called,
in the words of Mr Silbermann in The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight a "dress rehearsal of death" (120),
an experience which somewhat later the poet Shade in
Pale Fire and Mr. R. in Transparent Things will share
with them. For the purpose of writing the book Sebastian
has split into two like Smurov, one observing, the other
being observed, and these two, V and Sebastian, merge
back into one on the last page of the novel. The device
is disclosed (or rather hinted at) only in the last
paragraph, although one comes to suspect it much ear-
lier. Nearly until the end the pretence that V is
a real person writing about Sebastian is consistently
maintained, and on a special level this can
accepted as a fact.
even
be
After the negative and pessimistic conclusion of
the earlier novel and after what has emerged from Pnin
the title of the later one with its implied promise