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

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infinite trouble what he could have learnt from
the letters there and then.
Again, V's account of his visit to Sebastian's
best college friend at Cambridge, who was "the only
man in [Sebastian's] life with whom
[Sebastian]
had
been perfectly frank and natural" (44) and who had
therefore known him "intimately" (42), is not quite
so straightforward as it seems at first reading.
Parody intrudes again. Disconcertingly, it is easy
to be misled, for those passages of which one tends
to be suspicious, appear to have some serious implication
behind their seemingly parodistic surface,
whereas those passages which seem to indicate "some
lofty and rich intention" on the narrator's part and
which seem to convey some insight into Sebastian's
mind, turn out to be parodistic.
Much of their conversation deals with superficial
aspects of college life: breakfast in. Hall, lunch at
the Pitt, lectures, playing fives, tea with friends,
playing tricks on venerable old tutors. V asks questions
that seem trivial: "And where did Sebastian
sit? " (43); "And tell me,... what about games? Was
Sebastian good at games? " (41), and receives answers
that seem just as trivial, such as a lengthy description
of Sebastian's failure at tennis. He indulges
in an equally lengthy explanation about Sebastian's
not quite perfect English. To all this apparently
meaningless material Sebastian's old friend adds a
few anecdotes from the beginning of Sebastian's time
at Cambridge. One feels as if one were on the uncer-