Narrative Ethics Of Vladimir Nabokov's Fiction From The Perspective Of Character Narrator

Vladimir Nabokov?1899-1977?,a writer with unique talent and individuality,always evokes controversy in modern history of fiction.Despite the divergent opinions of his literary fame,he is unarguably recognized as one of the precursors of postmodern literature and one of the best English writers of the twentieth century.Research interest in him never dwindled since his presence in the world of literature in the early 1920s.Narrative ethics,the relation of Nabokov‘s works to political,historical and cultural domains,is one of the important facets of his art of fiction and literary thoughts.Narrative ethics are rich and profound in Nabokov‘s works,most typified by those featuring character narrators,often the protagonists,telling their individual experiences.The present dissertation displays how Nabokov‘s art of character narrations are deeply related to narrative ethics with a methodology of probing inside-out and outside-in the representative novels,which means inquiring the ethics in the story and storytelling within the text and the ethical implications when putting the text into social and historical background without.The following chapters are organized chronologically around relationships between Vladimir Nabokov‘s character-narrated fictions and narrative ethics as suggested in the three most representative works witnessing his course of maturing as a writer believing that manner and matter are inseparable and a deep morality is inherent in every genuine work of art.Kicking totalitarianism,embracing Russian liberalism culture,and having strong historical awareness are the narrative ethics of Nabokov‘s character narrations exemplified through the story and storytelling of the narrator and the implied author.Chapter one explores Nabokov‘s notoriously meaningless character narration Despair and its relations with Nabokov‘s strong but oft-neglected political attitude—his unrelenting opposition to totalitarianism and correspondingly his love of individual freedom.By probing meticulously into the characterization,the narrator Hermann‘s storytelling and their relations with the implied Nabokov,I hold that the absurd image of Hermann indirectly demonstrates the young Nabokov‘s political protest against totalitarianism and his ardent embrace of individuality.Unlike more direct concern for social-political subjects in the works of realist writers,this?anti-novel?by Nabokov embodies a very traditional realistic core in an extraordinarily novel way.Chapter two elaborates Nabokov‘s Russian Liberal complex implied in the seemingly simple but perplexingly difficult character narration Pnin.Locating Pnin in the context of Nabokov‘s suffocating period of being an obscured Englishémigréwriter in the United States,I argue that Pnin is constructed as a respectable old Russian liberal through the two levels of communication between the narrator and narratee and the implied author and his audiences.The novel is a tribute to the antique Russian liberalism and a scar of Nabokov‘s cultural reincarnation from a Russian to an American.The novel carries with it an undercurrent of sorrow and pity for the down-played old Russian liberal culture,which Nabokov regards as the achievement of Russian people‘s years of struggle for freedom.Chapter three deals with Nabokov‘s late-year masterpiece conundrum Pale Fire in which the character narrator is desperate to revisit or recreate a past by putting fragments in the nook of Shade‘s literary shadow to find a meaning of life and commemorate a horrible history as witnessed by his own eyes.This re-examination of Pale Fire shows that Nabokov through Kinbote‘s telling communicates with the audiences his abhorrence of and perplexities over the sinister part of historical practices.Kinbote‘s dual role both as a character and narrator provides a rich arena for ethical inquiry.The individual tales he intends to tell as notes happen on a macro historical canvass with a watermark of Nabokov‘s thoughts on history.These chapters together work out the contention of this dissertation that with the main character‘s telling their own stories,Nabokov‘s character narrations tell stories of the implied author‘s attitude towards totalitarianism,the old Russian liberalism and revolution history,reflecting Nabokov‘s understanding of politics and morality of human civilization in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and constituting the main narrative ethics of his character narration.