earticle

영어

This paper investigates how Vladimir Nabokov put into practice his narrative strategies. He used many experimental techniques in his fictions. So many critics judge him as a modernist or postmodernist, but we need to search for his ‘literariness' before making such categorizations.
Vladimir Nabokov remarks that ‘reality’ is a subjective matter, saying: “You can get near and near, so to speak, to reality, but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable.” Reality actually remains for Nabokov the inexhaustible source of his fictions. In short Nabokov‘s statement is really a metaphor for his own fictional techniques.
His fictions are composed like chess problems, parodying to some degree traditional literary forms: melodrama(Lolita), the definitive biography(The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), the critical analyses(Pale Fire), family(Ada), and so on. Nabokov regards parody as his main literary narrative strategy. The parody of conventions is a way for Nabokov to trip up his readers and to involve them, as he notes, “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game”
Nabokov's fiction are full of allusion and illusion, verbal felicity and wit and so on. Some critics underestimate his fictions by insisting that they have no serious theme. But he is simply not a trickster, or hoax player, but a serious artist. The games and deceptions, the parodies and distortions, the allusions and illusions through his works suggest that they are an integral part of his total art; that they, in fact, suggest a whole vision of reality and life. Narrative strategy makes Nabokov perhaps the most consistently successful master among contemporary writers, and it is the triumph of his art.