A Study Of Black Humor In Nabokov 's Novels

The famous Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov(1899-1977), who firstly practiced black humor, also ranked as a famous stylist, critic, translator and poet. Since the 21 st century, there has been an increasing trend of research about black humor. However, most of them were focused on Heller, Pynchon, Vonnegut and several other writers. Yet Vladimir Nabokov, who firstly practiced black humor and wrote many works about black humor, gained less attention than that he had deserved.Among Nabokov’s literary creations about black humor, there were a popular and wide-spread book among American readers named Pnin, a bestseller for many years named Lolita, the Pale Fire that surprised many critics, and many other fine works such as Invitation to a Beheading, The Eye as well as Laughter in the Dark.Many works of Nabokov described the tragic characters and absurd social phenomenon with cynical attitude, which had a unique characteristic of black humor and profound theme connotation. Based on close reading and starting from the research on Nabokov’s black humor, this article aims to discuss his works through three chapters, thus offering the readers a comprehensive understanding of Nabokov’s black humor.The first chapter explored the art of black humor of Nabokov’s works, mainly through four aspects including narrative art, language art, plot art, and graphic art.About black humor narrative art, Nabokov was very good at parody, unreliable narrative, metafiction and other narrative techniques. At the same time, Nabokov was also a great master of language games, and he fully demonstrated his language talents.Language skills like irony, wordplay, distortion, exaggeration, repetition deepened the art of black humor, so that we could appreciate the unique charm of the language. Art of plot concluded three aspects including abnormal laughter, absurd banter, humor and irony. In term of images in the works, Nabokov mainly created two kinds of people who are puppets and anti-heros. The second chapter deeply discussed the profound themes behind the black humor in Nabokov’s novels: absurd, the other sideof the world, nostalgic, anti-war, alienation and so on. Chapter one and two are mainly deep and detailed analysis of Nabokov’s novels. Chapter three managed to dig the deep meaning behind Nabokov’s novels based on the previous two chapters including humane care, false doctrine and spiritual crisis.All in all, many of Nabokov’s novels had wonderful art of black humor, not only in narrative, language, plot and image, but also in the subject. Therefore there was no doubt that Nabokov himself was a veteran in black humor. His black humor art was pioneering, leaving extensive and profound influence on later writers.