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

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for him the dimension of a major problem and he proceeds
to treat it as one. Simple and "normal" ways of
action never occur to him. But neither his initial
complicated efforts to avoid the two professors (until
he eventually seems to be playing a hilarious game of
hide-and-seek with them) nor his later efforts to identify
them lead to anything at all. In fact, although
he is never aware of it, he gets them more thoroughly
confused than ever, inviting the one to his party
while he thinks he is inviting the other, and causing
wonder and amusement at his apparent oddity when (in
his seeming triumph over them) he makes sly quips
which are, in the circumstances, quite-pointless (156).
Paradoxically and ironically Pnin gives the impression
of being singularly absent-minded because he
spends so much time thinking and analysing situations.
He thinks at the wrong moments, creating such farfetched
problems that he cannot cope with (or does not
even see) the issues immediately at hand, and fails to
do the necessary or obvious thing. He gets into absurd
and nightmarish situations although (or just because)
he tries so hard to avoid them, because he is "too
painfully on the alert" (13), because he thinks and
analyses when he should act or react. In this way he
manages to get himself defeated even when there is no
enemy whatever, neither of the human norof the inani-
mate kind. He simply conjures up the conditions of
defeat himself by complicating simple issues and getting
himself into Pninian quandaries about, for example,
whether he should carry the manuscript of a lecture he