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

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raises. He allows Sebastian Knight to use parody "as
a kind of springboard of serious emotion"115, and
treating the questions that move him in a comic manner,
he remains true to his conviction that "... the
difference between the comic side of things and
their cosmic side depends on one sibilant. "116
Accordingly, he brings the comic sides of things
and their serious aspects into such close proximity
that the borderline gets blurred, that they become,
in fact, inseparable. (If they are treated separately
in the following chapters, this will be done only for
the sake of convenience. Even while enhancing each
other's qualities, both the comedy and the seriousness
being heightened by contrast, they also blend
and merge. The superficially comic elements reveal
their serious implications and the serious sides of
things prove to have also a comic touch. In the last
analysis it becomes impossible to separate the manner
from the matter, for the matter is actually contained
in and expressed through, the manner.
In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, for example,
the parodies of various forms of biographical re-.
search contain within them the questions that lead to
the metaphysical speculations described earlier in
this Introduction. They ridicule old and established
ways of research and expose them as unreliable, insufficient
and misleading, but even while ridiculing
them, they actually raise Nabokov's basic question,
namely how much and what can be known, and the question
if there is any way to true knowledge at all.