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

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a new, wholly artistic reality. And this artistic
reality is the rendering of the "true reality" the
artist has perceived.
It is thus that Shade in Pale Fire, for example,
gains through the medium of Kinbote an insight into
what he calls "the web of sense"89, the ordering and
meaningful pattern underlying his seemingly unpatterned
and unordered life. It is thus, too, that the
narrator of Pnin uncovers for the reader the "true
reality" of Pnin's life, the "average reality" of
which - and the only reality perceived by the Wain-
dell people -
looks like a meaningless succession of
absurd and comic incidents. Hugh Person in Transparent
Things does not see beyond the "average reality"
and sometimes not even beyond the "thin veneer of
immediate reality" of his own life. To him it appears
as no more than a series of unrelated and haphazard
incidents, and it is again left to an artist, Mr. R.,
to uncover that there are a number of incidents and
moments which form a very clear and very meaningful
"web of sense".
According to Nabokov it is again only the artist
who has the .:
ability to see through the "average reality"
of a person and to discover something more real behind
the surface appearance that lends itself to misinterpretations
and subjective views. It is thus the
narrator in Pnin who uncovers a real human being
behind the comic freak that the Waindell people see
in Timofey Pnin.
Humbert Humbert's vision of Lolita is even profounder