Fictitious Reality

Russian-born American literary master, Vladimir Nabokov, is a unique and distinctive figure in the history of the twentieth-century American literature. He is a novelist, poet, scholar, and lepidopterist, and also widely recognized as one of the outstanding literary stylists of the twentieth century. Nabokov is one of the pioneering American writers who are continuously interested in experiments. Stressing the relationship of the artist to his works,he broke free from the traditional patterns of writing. While the prolific writer had all together eighteen novels, each of which is well worth reading and analyzing time after time.The thesis aims at analyzing Pnin, Nabokov's first English novel that is widely received by the American readers, from three aspects, namely, the narrative structure, the narrator and the treatment of time. This less-than-200-page novel is composed of seven chapters. The very first chapter and the last one form a complete ring. At the same time, for each chapter, there is also an interior minor ring hiding. From the general to the specific, the whole novel shows a perfect orbicular structure. The second part talks about the mysterious narrator. The narrator in the novel, on the one hand, is a dramatized character, while on the other, an omniscient narrator. Thus, the unreliability of the narrator can be seen from the duality of the narrator. From this, we can get the unique idea of the writer toward the reality of art. The last part analyzes the writer's treatment of time from the time parameters in the novel. First, the writer processes the time artificially, such as confusing dates and memories, and the artificiality of time. Second, there exists a dual time scheme, which is mainly about the interwoven past and present as well as the transcending of the psychic time over the chronological time.Through the analysis of the above three parts, the thesis is intended to explore the unique idea of the Nabokov on the relationship of art and reality. In Nabokov's opinion, his realistic life and artistic life are closely related. The truth of life is hidden behind the moment of their combination. And Nabokov will seize the moment through his writing, which is the true value of art.