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

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himself from their influence. It does certainly not
yield the picture of an artist from whom one would
espect the novels V describes. The picture of Sebastian
that Mr Goodman arrives at is that of a conventional
figure: "an 'essentially modern' character"
(58), "a youth of acute sensibility'in a cruel cold
world" (59) with which, apparently, he did not come
to grips. Goodman's Sebastian is a type, a weak person,
influenced and shaped by the spirit of the time
in which he lived, and by historical events. War and
its consequences damaged his sensitive soul, "a fatal
split
[opened] between Knight the artist and the great
booming world about him" (109), and it seems, if one
believes Goodman, that he never found his way out of
the "misery which had begun as an earnest young man's
reaction to the rude world into which his temperamental
youth had been thrust... " (110).
It is also "poor Knight", "a product and victim of
'our time'" (58-59),
...
unhappy, lonely, "Byronic"
(109) whom Goodman finds behind what he calls the
"cynicism" (60) of Sebastian's earlier books. The
author who he pretends is present is the author as he
sees him. The emotions he finds behind incidents and
descriptions, and which he pretends are the author's
very own, are those that he thinks fit in a person of
the type he has described. In order not to/have his
concept overthrown, he ignores that which does not fit
into it and "never quotes anything that may clash with
the main idea of his fallacious work" (62). A com-
pletely different Sebastian might be visible, Mr Goodman