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

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in quite a new light and defy all "moral" comment
and
judgement.
One intention behind all these devices, and behind
the parodies in particular, can be said to be the same
that V describes as giving Sebastian Knight's works
their characteristic quality:
[he]
...
was ever hunting out the things
which had once been fresh and bright but
which were now worn to a thread...
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Again like Sebastian Knight, Nabokov puts in their
places something new and original, something that has
not been so used in the past as to be indissolubly
linked in the reader's mind with some conventional as-
sociation. The result is what Fowler deplores: a lack
of any "real sense of participation in the story", but
in exchange for that,
Through parody and self-parody... and by
parodying the reader's conception of
'story' - his stereotyped expectations
and preoccupation with 'plot' machinations -
Nabokov frees him to experience a fiction
intellectually, aesthetically, ecstatically.
Thus it appears that, far from being a weakness, as
Fowler implies, the story's distant and unreal quality
is, in fact, an essential trait of the novel, fully
intended and consciously created by the author.
The analyses of the other novels have shown that
the intellectual, aesthetic and ecstatic enjoyment,
cannot be seen as the only experience given the reader
by a Nabokov novel. Along with the insights into their
artistic qualities the novels also grant insights into
various philosophical problems and Nabokov's handling
of them. The central concerns of Ada were named above,
3.6