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

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a peachstone. The very questions the child asked
himself in his fever now beset Pnin: the pattern of
the foliage and flowers around him is as intricate as
that on the wallpaper of old was. It seems impossible
to detect the system of the design, which no doubt
must be there; but at last, "during one melting
moment, he had the sensation of holding... the key
he had sought" (24). ; Us Julia Bader says, the scene
"serves as a retrospective mirror into Pnin's childhood"38,
and of such mirrors there are a few more.
Pnin feels transported back into the past when sitting
in the lecture hall of Cremona (27-28); when watching
a film about Russia (81-82); at the place of his friend
Kukolnikov (133); and even the combination of some
sound and the warm wind is sufficient to take him
back to a "dim dead days" in a Baltic summer resort
and to evoke "the sounds, and the smells, and the
sadness -"
(114).
But this particular scene in the park is more than
just a mirror. The narrator has been accused by critics
of not'ftlfilling his role as a faithful chronicler
of events and of not being a trustworthy biographer.
His sources of information about Pnin being for the
most part the accounts of others,. he-yet talks about
things that one would expect only Pnin himself to know.
Everything that surpasses the bbvious incidents, all
the insights into Pnin's mind and emotions, clearly
surpass what can have come to his knowledge through
others. Pnin himself at two points denies the narrator's
statements and calls him "a dreadful inventor" (185;