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

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is going to give, on his person or in the suit he is
going to wear for the occasion. In the end, and because
the confusion he has created is too great, he leaves
it in his bag and takes the wrong manuscript instead.
(It is only the author's kindness that spares him a
final catastrophe and allows him after all to arrive
at his lecture with the manuscript he desperately
needs. )
Pnin does not even react "normally" where laws and
conventions require him to do so. It appears, indeed,
that he is quite unaware that laws and established
ways of behaviour have in many situations replaced
thinking and what appears to him as logic. For everybody
except him these laws and conventions have become
so firmly established that they are not questioned
any more. They have become so predominant as
to provoke certain automatic reactions and patterns
of behaviour that make further thinking unnecessary.
As far as Pnin is concerned they might as well not
exist. He does not react automatically (which to
others means naturally and normally); he is not conditioned
by conventions. He thinks and applies logic
and defends what his logically thinking mind tells
him is right. Unfortunately his thinking, although it
tends to take rather sinuous paths, is also characterized
by a certain harmlessness and naivety, so that
his approach to certain questions is paradoxically too
complicated and too simple at the same time. Why, he
argues, for example, and at a very unsuitable moment
too, should he stop at a red light, encouraging "the