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

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which induces the reader to sympathize with Pnin,
to take sides with him and react rather scornfully
against those who have so blindly made him their
laughing
stock.
Bathos, too, is used to evoke sympathy rather than
hilarity, such as when Joan Clements finds Pnin in a
truly distressed state after Liza has left him, and
is immediately confronted with an instance of his
adventurous and comic English:
He came out of
[the pantry], darkly flushed,
wild-eyed, and she was shocked to see that
his face was a mess of unwiped tears.
'I search, John, for the viscous and
sawdust, ' he said tragically (59).
Most important, however, in determining the reader's
attitude to Pnin is the insight he is given to the
"inner Pnin" of whom the Waindell people know nothing.
"Always in Nabokov, the most sensitive conscious-
nesses are those made to bear enormous pain. "32 This
is insinuated at first only in short and unobtrusive
remarks which, moreover, stand in very comic contexts.
In the middle of a description of Pnin almost collapsing
over his own subtle jokes in class, there is the la-
conic statement, added in brackets and as an after-
thought, that the world of his youth had been "abol-
ished by one blow of history" (12), and in the middle
of his comically disastrous journey to Cremona, Pnin
himself dismisses his fears about losing a travelling
4.
bag by reminding himself that he has "lost, dumped,
shed many more valuable things in his day" (19).
"Such a comment", says Morton, "is easily passed over,
but it opens a way through the trivial problems at the
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