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

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indeed only the very thinnest surface of it; he also
shakes our belief and trust in old and established
norms, in the very norms indeed, against which Pnin
has so far been measured. For many purposes the "normal"
approach that Waindell people and ourselves bring
to things is undoubtedly reasonable and practical, as
Pnin's difficulties prove by contrast. But from a
superior point of view, from which practical ends become
inessential, all actions that are prompted by
habits, all those which have become simple reflex actions,
and even those at the basis of which lie convention
and ceremony, are seen to lack all freshness
and originality ; people move and behave and think in
fixed and rigid patterns and "give us the impression
of puppets in motion. "25 "Campus dummies" (146)
Nabokov very appropriately calls the population of
Waindell College Campus. From that point of view a
great part of "normal" human behaviour proves to be
prompted by the very automatism and to be characterized
by the very inflexibility that Bergson sees as
the basic source of the comic.
26
From that point of
view, then, not Pnin but the world around him is
comic, insofar as it is absent-minded, and mindless,
automatic and inflexible. These qualities are so
prominent in the world around him that Pnin, when he
leaves Waindell, "bears away with him all of the
world's vitality. " 27
All this, as was said above, is implicit in the
relation of Pnin's story rather than stated in the
form of open criticism, but Nabokov is not so chari-