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

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"schools and trends", and is convinced (like Nabokov
himself) that nothing but individual talent matters,
is disliked, and is kept on the staff of his college
only as a "distinguished freak" (96). Significantly,
too, all the outsiders take to each other: Lake to
Victor, who reveres him (95); Victor to Pnin, and Pnin
to Victor; and Clements is after some initial hesita-
tion won over to Pnin, and "a tender mental concord"
(41) develops between the two men.
Apart from this friendship, Pnin strikes one as a
lonely figure. He makes his way all alone and "very
tired"-across the "sad campus" (79). "... battered and
stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness" (144),
he still has to change his lodgings "about every sem-
ester" (62); even his office at the college is taken
over without much ado by a younger colleague (69-70).
All things taken together, his world, with all the
rooms in which he has lived over the years,
in his
...
memory now resembled those displays
of grouped elbow chairs on show,
and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which,
ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle
in the soft light of a furniture
store beyond which it snows, and the dusk
deepens, and nobody really loves anybody
(62).
When he has at last found a little house for himself,
he feels at a loss whom to invite to his house-warming
party: his ", little list of guests... had body but. it
c
lacked bouquet" (146), but when he tries to give it
bouquet, his invitations are, one after the other, de-
clined on various pretexts.
The Eye suggests that people do not know each