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

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one evoking hilarity: the comic Pnin; "the outstanding
Waindell campus curio"5; the Pnin who is in one way
or another always out of step with the world around
him; the other evoking compassion: the pathetic and
sad Pnin; the exile; "the perpetual wanderer"6, battered
and stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness"
(144).
With the emergence of the two Pnins the novel loses
much of its superficial simplicity. Though less clearly
defined than in The Eye and in The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight, the central concern of Pnin closely
resembles that of these two novels. The analysis of
The Eye has suggested how easily people fail in their
appreciation of others, and how the "true reality" of
a person can get lost behind the faulty images created
of him in the minds of those around him. This leads
in Sebastian Knight to a quest of infinite complexity,
and Pnin, in the very process of depicting and understanding
a , truly human being", also poses the question
whether such a depiction and such an understanding
is at all possible. It is true that instead of a whole
variety of Smurovs and (later) Sebastians there are
only two versions of Pnin, but both these are open to
doubt, and in the attempt to single out the more
likely version, or to form a picture of the real
personality of Pnin, the reader gets involved in the
question described above. Gradually this problem is
widened, and round the main concern are grouped other
questions all dealing with the approach to individual
aspects of reality.