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

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one-'s own prejudices and insinuate his vision into
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one's own consciousness.
With him, one can discover
new and surprising aspects of reality and discoverthat
there is more delight, more beauty and wonder,
but also that there is more sadness than the "normal"
approach discloses. As one critic has put it: "By the
absurdities of his life, by his laughable preoccupation
with the patently irrelevant, he persuades us to
readjust our focus and to revise our own sight. "24
However, this is not the attitude brought to Pnin
at Waindell. No one there is persuaded by him to readjust
his focus or to revise his sight. On the contrary,
as has been seen, Pnin himself has become the victim
of the conventional approach to the world. Once people
have made up their minds about him and decided that
he is an outsider and a freak., they do not let anything
interfere with this notion. He has been labelled
and behind the convenient label no one cares to look.
This mindless approach is fatal when applied to
human beings. It also reflects on those who exercise
it and casts a new and surprising light on them. All
along Nabokov has led the reader to believe that it
is Pnin who is the comic figure of the novel, and so
he is when he is measured against what is commonly
accepted as the norm.
However, without a word of open criticism, and
.
almost imperceptibly, Nabokov cuts the ground under
our feet. Not only has he led us to realize that, com-
pared with Pnin, we miss a great deal of what the
world offers, and that, what we look at as reality is