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

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206
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edge and understanding,, an insight into the nature
of things, and, above all, true knowledge of himself.
He undertakes the quest for himself through the
fictitious biography. Real insight, however, he
finds, cannot be obtained through the traditional
methods of biography. They do not lead to more than
superficial knowledge. The methods that do not pay
attention to this fact and which do not even betrau
an awareness on the biographer's part of his shortcomings
and limitations, are accordingly parodied and
exposed by Sebastian for what he has found them to
be: "dead things among living ones; dead things
shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to
be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the
fraud" (85). And these parodies are "[springboards]
into the highest region of serious emotion", for even
while exposing and ridiculing established procedures
in the quest for knowledge as insufficient and misleading,
they contain within themselves Sebastian's
question if there is any way at all that leads to
real
knowledge.
How very complex the novel is becomes apparent
when one realizes how many of the things that were
classed as simply parodistic assume an additional
quality when seen in the new light of Sebastian himself
being the author of the book about him. Things that
appeared as the comically awkward blunders of an in-
competent biographer can now be explained by Sebastian's
reluctance to disclose the private aspects of his life
and to analyse emotional upsets, both of which may