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

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The doubt with which one approaches The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight turns out to be justified, for
the truth about Sebastian and his real life proves
to be extremely elusive. Even at the end, and even
though the narrator finishes on a note of confidence
and satisfaction, implying that he has indeed found
what he has set out to find, the reader feels "that
the promise made by the title has not been kept by
the novel. "9 And throughout the novel one feels that
perhaps one has missed something essential, failed
to understand or see some revelation about Sebastian.
In fact, one has the same feeling with regard to
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight that the narrator
has with regard to Sebastian's own novel The Doubtful
Asphodel:
I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of
Sebastian's masterpiece that the 'absolute
solution' is there, somewhere, concealed in
some passage I have read too hastily, or
that is intertwined with other words whose
familiar guise deceived me. I don't know
any other book that gives me this special
sensation, and perhaps this was the author's
special intention (169).
This is not only due to the difficulty of the quest.
It is also due. to the fact that what seems to promise
in the title to be simply Sebastian's biography is
not just that, but a complicated structure of many
parts that mirror each other in various ways. It is,
or so it seems, a book by one writer (Nabokov) about
another writer (V), who writes about his brother
(Sebastian), who in his turn wrote novels, some of
them parodies of extant literary works. The book does-
give some biographical information
about
Sebastian,