Fiction And Reality

Vladimir Vladiminovich Nabokov (1899-1977), a Russian-born American writer, is always regarded as one of the world's greatest writer, stylist and postmodern figure in the 20^th century. He is quite a prolific writer and has accomplished eight English novels as well as many other Russian novels, poems, plays, short stories, translations, reviews and other works, among which we can name some famed ones: Russian novels The Defense (1930), Laughter in the Dark (1932), Despair (1936), The Gift (1937), Invitation to a Beheading (1938); English novels The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962); Translations The Song of Igor's Campaign (1960), Eugene Onegin (literary criticism, 1964); a collection of short stories Spring in Fialta (1956); other works Nikolai Gogol (1944), Speak, Memory (autobiography, 1960). Generally speaking, in his middle and late times, Nabokov concentrated on novel writing. His novels are mainly concerned with the exploration of the fictional essence of reality, the relationships between the artist and his works and the making of such fictionality.One of his three best novels, Pale Fire, brings him, compared to the controversial fame after Lolita, a great reputation as the founding father of postmodern experimental novels. In this novel, Nabokov deliberately overthrew the traditional definition of novel, discards the traditional form and invents a completely different and brand-new way of novel writing. He adopts three images-namely Mirror, Labyrinth and Chess-to make the stories and characters mutually-reflect each other to create a real-and-fictional labyrinth world that is featured with distracting textual fragments, abundant-redundant details and unreliable narrators. Thus we readers need to do the reading as if playing chess game with Nabokov, to reconstruct the story between fragments and details and find a way out by screening the true information from the false. But after our ecstasy of reading, we need also to be aware of Nabokov's real intention. His intention is not only to enjoy this reading game, but also, by erasing the dividing line between reality and fiction, to fuse them together and create a world of his own, a world of fun-house for both him the author and us the readers.The thesis is divided into four chapters, exploring these three main images in Pale Fire. Chapter One deals with Mirror, endeavoring to show how Nabokov by means of mirror strategy divides his whole book into several sub-texts and how the characters reflect each other. Chapter Two examines the labyrinth strategy to show how Nabokov makes Pale Fire a labyrinth by means of fragment, detail and unreliable narrator. Chapter Three, with the assistance of Nabokovian thoughts on "reader", goes deep into the novel, to demonstrate that reading the novel is a process of solving a complicated chess problem and then raise a possible solution. Chapter Four, by combining Nabokov's views on reality, literature, memory and past, explains why Nabokov would care so much about reality and fiction and then draws a conclusion that Nabokov's intension is to create a world for him himself to live in forever.