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

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author, but for him they are of a different nature.
For him the unity is proved by the title, which is
"meant to refer not to the crude theft of Shade's
manuscript by Kinbote, but to the less evident factor
of the bonds and interplay of light and reflection
between the novel's disparate bodies... " 63 ; by the
epigraph64; by the prevalence of death as a theme in
both poem and commentary (both the King's flight from
Zembla and his persecution by Gradus are connected
with death)65, and by the rejected draft portions:
"if they are Shade's [they]
would prove.. that the
.
old poet was indeed on the verge of writing a poem
about Zembla. "66 Field doubts Stegner's conclusion
that Kinbote has understood the poem, and all his
conclusions taken together lead him to the statement
that "the primary author - even without Nabokov's
acknowledgement that Kinbote really does not know
what is going on in Shade's poem - must be Shade. "67
And he rejects Stegner's conclusion on another ground:
he finds it "in a sense, just as confusing as the
apparently obvious idea that Kinbote and Shade are
quite separate. "
A sane man may invent an insane character,
and we call him an artist; an insane'man
who invents a perfectly sane character is,
also an artist, but ipso facto no longer
insane in the way that Kinbote is. What
sort of an Alice would the Mad Hatter make
for us? 4.
Stegner's reading, he says, leaves the reader "with
an enormous and rather pointless joke for its own
sake - something which Nabokov has never done. "68
That Kinbote's 'stupidity' and his 'misunder-