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

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In the degree in which V's search concentrates
for a while not so much on Sebastian but on the mysterious
Russian woman from whom he expects revelations
about his brother, the detective elements in V's account
become more and more prominent. In detective
stories, the detective almost invariably deals with
murder cases. He looks into the circumstances that
led to the murder, and his aim, always brilliantly
achieved, is the hunting down of the murderer. V's
is obviously not a murder case, but all the elements
are there to give to his further work the basic pattern
of a detective story: "One corpse, one investigator,
some obscure photographs and burned letters,
a mysterious woman..., faint clues dropped here and
there.. . 1127
To find the mysterious woman, V says, is "a scientific
necessity", for she is "the missing link in
[Sebastian's]
evolution" (112). V himself now makes
allusions to the detective qualities of his work:
"The question is how, not why", he pronounces, quite
in the manner of a professional detective, in answer
to one of Mr Silbermann's questions (120), and prides
himself on a "Sherlock Holmes stratagem" on another
occasion (143). But whatever he may think of his detective
talents, it becomes ever more apparent that
they are minimal. And just as V can in no way be
said to be a match for the classical detective with
whom he compares himself, all the other detective
elements soon turn out to be only superficially like
their models. Parody now takes over completely,