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

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person. But it is still more real to a
botanist. And yet another stage of
reality is reached with that botanist
who is a specialist in lilies. You.: can
get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to
reality; but you can never get near
enough because reality is an infinite
succession of steps, levels of perception,
false bottoms, and hence unquenchable,
unattainable. You can
know more and more about one thing,
but you can never know everything about
one thing: it's hopeless. So that we
live surrounded by more or less
objects.
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ghostly
What is true of things applies in an even higher degree
to persons. If it is next to impossible to know even
things, as. they are in themselves, if they remain
"ghosts" to us, how much more hopeless must any
attempt be to try and understand what a person really
is behind what he appears to be, to see and understand
all the complexities of his soul and character:: The
subjectivity and relativity of what we know about
others is proved in Pnin, The Eye, and The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight. Pnin's most obvious character-
istics being his tendency to fall into quandaries over
simple matters, the curious workings of his mind,
and an apparent absent-mindedness, he is irrevocably
put down as a freak and nobody cares to look behind
the convenient label and find the real person. The Eye
and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight both illustrate
how our impression o f another person is determined by
our attitude to him, our preoccupations, interests
and emotions. One person - Smurov in The Eye and
Sebastian in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight -
is
seen to evoke highly divergent, even contradictory
pictures in the minds of other persons, each of whom