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

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The case is quite similar in Pale Fire. Kinbote's
commentary to Shade's poem is, of course, a parody of
a scholarly commentary.
_ But this superficially ludicrous
composition of his provides through its very form the
answer to the central metaphysical question of this
poem, so that the manner is no longer just the vessel
for the subject matter, but is inseparably linked
with
it.
In Pale Fire, incidentally, comedy and seriousness
are seen to interact in yet another way. The comedy
of the incongruous commentary in. its turn has its
source in Kinbote's tragedy -
his madness, which re-
suits from his complete identification with the story
the commentary relates.
Nabokov is perhaps nearest the strategy of absurd
plays in his use of comic elements in Invitation to
a Beheading and Bend Sinister, where things are comic,
and horrible and frightening at the same time. The
superficially comic dream images in Invitation to a
Beheading turn out to be a rendering of the senselessness
and horror of the world in which Cincinnatus
lives, and they contain and evoke this horror. Here
perhaps more than anywhere else in Nabokov's novels
both the comedy and the seriousness are heightened
by their close proximity and create a nightmarish
effect very similar to the effect created by an absurd
play. What has here been said about only a few of
Nabokov's novels applies to all of them. Nowhere can
their comedy and their seriousness be separated.
When V in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight speaks