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

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tiously follows all the moves they dictate, his ac-
count soon takes on the complicated structure de-
scribed above, which has striking similarities with
that of Sebastian's own The Prismatic Bezel. That
novel has methods of composition for heroes. V ex-
plains:
It is as if a painter said: look, here
I'm going to show you not the painting
of a landscape, but the painting of
different ways of painting a certain
landscape, and I trust their harmonious
fusion will disclose the landscape as
I intend you to see it (89).
In much the same way the different methods of bi-
13
ography become the heroes of V's "twisted quest. "
One suspects that the last sentence of this descrip-
tion, too, will later turn out to have some signifi- -
cance with regard to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
One of the methods pursued throughout the book
is that which tries to reconstruct the outward cir-
cumstances of a person's life and relies on them for
information about the person's character and mind.
It advises the biographer not to neglect even "small
and trivial facts" because they "may throw a sudden
light on a hidden aspect of the personality"14, to
include "any fact that adds to the physical know-
ledge of the hero"15, and to realize that "for us,
today, the most trivial habit will often suggest the
interpretation for some major trait of character
and
[that] the accredited anecdote becomes an epi-
gram. "16 Diaries, letters, "no source of information
should be neglected. "17
To all appearances V behaves as a biographer should.