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

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nary and complicated by making not only the words
look "self-conscious", which he avowedly likes to do
(56), but the sentences, the structure, and the contents
as well. At the first reading, when the "real"
story remains rather obscure, his mannerisms of speech
and style seem to unite simply to produce an overall
comic effect. At hardly any one point does he refrain
from commenting on the accepted stylistic conventions,
which he has to follow himself to a certain degree,
and on the conventional narrative patterns which he
cannot quite avoid either: he exposes them, rejects
them, sneers at them, parodies them. He intrudes into
his narrative continually. "Intrusions discussing the
book itself or its frailties can range from a 'mean-
while' or explicit digression to the most elaborate
burlesque of the technique of other authors. "3 Every-
thing that this statement allows of can be found in
Hermann's tale. There are his comments on his own
choice of individual words, on his imagery, on his
puns, some of them pleased and satisfied, some of them
more
critical.
4
There are his comments, mostly ap-
preciative, on individual sentences or whole passages
5
and, once, his somewhat puzzled reaction to something
he has just written.
6 Not only are there interruptions
of the flow of the narrative throughout the book, and
digressions; Hermann explicitly draws thq reader's at-
tention to them as if they were not quite conspicious
enough, and explains why they are there.
7
His
comments
on conventional narrative devices range from one on
the habit that "indiscriminate novel-writers have of