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

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used to his behaving differently from everybody else
that when all of a sudden he behaves 1ike every-
body else, this comes as a little shock of surprise.
What in others is normal is not normal in him. In him,
it is incongruous and thus adds the finishing touch to
the picture of the comic Pnin.
This, then, is Pnin as seen by the majority of
people at Waindell, as described to the narrator by
Cockerell, and by the narrator to the reader.
He [Cockerell]
went on for at least two
hours, showing me everything - Pnin
teaching, Pnin eating, Pnin ogling a coed,
Pnin narrating the epic of the electric
fan which he had imprudently set going on
a glass shelf right above the bathtub into
which its own vibration had almost caused
it to fall; Pnin trying to convince Professor
Wynn, the ornithologist who hardly
knew him, that they were old pals,...
We heard Pnin criticize the various rooms
he had successively rented. We listened
to Pnin's account of his learning to drive
a car, and of his dealing with his first
puncture... (187-188).
Cockerell has an endless repertoire (187-189), though
it is not quite clear how much of his impersonation
is based on fact and how much of it his enthusiasm
has caused him to invent. However that may be, his
and the general Waindell image of Pnin is clearly in-
correct and one-sided. To put it in terms of The Eye:
people at Waindell know only a "phantom" that resembles
Pnin, and to that phantom they react. They do not know,
and make no effort to find out, whether there is any-
thing behind the comic person they see.
It becomes obvious by and by that their picture of
Pnin is rooted in their approach to all aspects of
life and reality, and this issue springs in turn