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

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Mary McCarthy admiringly calls Pale Fire, and Kenneth
Allsop says of the same novel that it is "A riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. "50
Except for saying that his novels are not
concerned with moral, social, didactic or other contemporary
problems, and neither deal with, nor are
intended to propagate, "general ideas", Nabokov's
statements contain no clue whatever as to what his
novels are about. It is only slowly and gradually,
and through patient re-reading (recommended by Nabokov
himself) or even re-re-reading, that one begins to
penetrate to their essential contents and content,
and then it becomes clear that one of their common
and prominent themes is reality. In following the
artistic exploration of it, the reader gets involved
in a difficult quest, and to understand all the complexities
and intricacies of this quest, the different
meanings that Nabokov attaches to the word "reality"
must first be specified.
The main distinction he makes is between "average
reality" and "true reality".
51
Kinbote in Pale Fire,
who often expresses his creator's opinions and can
therefore be accepted as an authority, echoes him
when he speaks of "average 'reality' perceived by the
communal eye"52, and the fact that he puts "reality"
in inverted commas and his addition: "perceived by
the communal eye" indicate that we are here concerned
with what Huxley says has only a "relative reality".
53
It is, again in Huxley's words, "the manifold world
of our everyday experience", the people we meet, daily