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

- 67 -
Pnin's appearance is comic, made up of a number of
incongruous elements both in his facial expression and
in his figure (7). Also, at the age of fifty-two, he
has got used to making concessions to the "heady atmosphere
of the New world" (8), and whereas he dressed
himself soberly and in a conventional manner in his
youth, he now sports fashionable and trendy clothes
and creates an image of himself that does not correspond
with his conservative beliefs, his sedate manners
and his old-fashioned inner self.
His comic diction, or, to be precise, his comic use
of English (for "his Russian was music"
[66]) is a
source of amusement to those around him and inspires
Cockerell to endless imitations (187). After so many
years in America Pnin admits himself that he still
speaks "in French with much more facility than in English"
(105), and, as examples are given, it becomes
indeed quite clear that mastering the language is still
a problem for him in many respects. A person's speech
becomes comic through faulty pronunciation, through
grammatical errors, through being "too prolix or concise"
or "by employing the wrong style. " 16 Pnin is
fighting a constant battle with the sounds of the English
language, but it is a losing battle: all his
vowels and consonants come out wrong; the results are
so odd at times as to be pronounced "mythopeic" (165).
Although by stubborn application Pnin has learnt enough
English to "handle practically any topic" (14), he
clearly still has some difficulty both with the pecu-
liarities of English grammar and with the choice of