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

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ment. Ridiculous persons are not simply "unlike",
they are also "bad in a way which renders [them] worth-
less or of no account even as bad"11, and they are
"inferior, either to the ordinary, or at least inferior
to what has been thought or claimed about
[them]"12
inferior also "in a way which obviates the possibility
of taking them seriously, that is as the object of any
serious emotion. " 13 The term "ludicrous", as Olson
uses it, has no moral implication. The basis of the
ludicrous, too, is "unlikeness", but it is an unlikeness
that makes a person neither worthless nor inferior.
There is no element of degradation in it; it
is, rather, the unexpected, surprising, sometimes bi-
zarre unlikeness of the odd, the eccentric, and the
quaint.
14
It can be stated at once that Pnin belongs to the
second category of comic persons. The background (the
standard) against wh*ich he is seen and against which
nearly everybody around him measures him, is a section
of modern (American)
society: the population of Wain-
dell and Waindell College campus.
_
Pnin's. very name is odd. It is a very unusual name:
"a preposterous little explosion" (32), unpronounce-
able for American tongues (26). It is, incidentally,
also the name of the eighteenth century Russian poet
Ivan Pnin, and, together with its allusions to one of
that poet's works, it is one of Nabokov's "private
Russian jokes" and is coloured by all sorts of associ-
ations (as the names of comic persons often are),
which also reflect on Pnin and his behaviour. . 15