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

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has been at work and has spared no trouble in his
attempt to help the reader in his approach to the
poet and his poem and to elucidate its problems for
him. However, the form is deceptive. It only serves
to trap the reader into believing that he is on safe
ground, into feeling secure and at ease because he
thinks he is concerned with something very familiar.
This security is then shattered by the realization
that what looked at first sight like the well-known
"real thing" is after all disturbingly different from
what it appears to be. This happens here just as it
happens in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and
the causes are the same.
There is in Pale Fire the same promise and pretence
of scrupulous and scholarly research, of objectivity
and truth as in Sebastian Knight, but the
promise is not kept. The result is the same comic
incongruity between form and contents; in fact, it
is much more obvious here than in the earlier novel.
There is the echoing of typical formulations, which,
through their incongruous contents, sound off the
note. There is, too, the same exaggeration of characteristic
traits of the genre that is imitated.
Its typical techniques and devices seem to be mirrored
perfectly, and yet have an odd look about them because
they are carried to ridiculous extremes., Its very
faults, potential and real, are so grotesquely multiplied
and magnified that "its worst potentialities
are seen realized. ' 12/13 All these taken together
"tip imitation into parody"14 and are responsible