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

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existence" (13). In his presence they behave in wicked
and unnatural ways, even when he is quite innocent for
once (64).
It contradicts all expectation and logic that a
thinking, intelligent human being should be inferior
to, and a victim of, inanimate, mindless objects,
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but even though Pnin has taken up some extraordinary
measures to protect himself, such as wearing rubber
gloves "so as to avoid being stung by the amerikanski
electricity in the metal of the shelving" (77), his
intelligence is constantly outwitted by that of the
objects around him, and he suffers one comic defeat
after
another.
He also gets defeated in his dealings with people,
and for exactly the same reason as in his dealings
with things: namely because he does not act (or react)
"normally". There are instances in which his "adversaries"
are not aware of any problem and in which
neither they nor Pnin himself are aware of his defeat.
Such is the case when he gets involved with the
"Twynns": Professor Tristram W. Thomas of the Department
of Anthropology and Professor Thomas Wynn of the Ornithological
Department who resemble each other. The
doppelgänger device is in itself almost a guarantee
of comic effects, and when someone like Pnin gets involved
with doppelgängers, comic effects are impossible
to avoid. When Pnin realizes (after eight years or so)
that a person he has known as Professor Wynn "was not
always Professor Wynn", but "at times... graded, as
it were, into somebody else" (149), this fact assumes