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

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More depth and reality are also given to Pnin's
life through the narrator's use of a device which
can be traced in Glory, then in The Defence and much
later in Transparent Things, which Nabokov comments
on in Speak, Memory37, and which Joan Clements describes
as typical of the narrator's novels:
But don't you think... that what he is
trying to do... practically in all his
novels... is... to express the fantastic
recurrence of certain situations? (159)
The most impressive and most fantastic example of
this occurs quite early in the novel, when Pnin, on
his journey to Cremona has what looks like a heart
attack. The sensations he experiences detach him for
the time being from his surroundings (19) and take
him back to a certain moment in his childhood when he
was ill, and which he now relives with the "sharpness
of retrospective detail that is said to be the dra-
matic privilege of drowning individuals" (21). How-
ever, it is not just a matter of reliving that past
moment, for in the surroundings in which he finds
himself sitting on a bench, a multitude of the features
from his childhood bedroom are miraculously repeated
and come": to life: not only the pattern of rhododendrons
and oak leaves on the wallpaper, but also the scene
that was depicted on a wooden. screen near his bed:
Pnin himself is the "old man hunched up on a bench"
(23), and before him, when he regains full conscious-
ness, he finds a duplicate of the squirrel which was
shown on his screen "holding a reddish object in its
front-. paws" (23)
- this object now turns out to be