Nabokov’s Intrusion Into His Fictional World

Nabokov, who rose to fame upon the publication of Lolita, is one of the most unique and remarkable writers of the20th Century. His Pale Fire, though not so well known as Lolita to public, is far more innovative and experimental than Lolita. It is by Pale Fire that he has won the praise of the father of postmodernist novel. In Pale Fire, the pattern of traditional novel is totally overturned. Its collage of text fragments, excessive language games, and inter-textuality of different levels of texts, pose new challenges to readers’ patience and literary attainment, harassing readers from going through the work in detail, let alone understanding its implication and artistic value. This is probably the reason why until now Pale Fire still does not appeal to popular taste and is unacceptable to most readers.However, scholars at home and abroad still notice the value of this precious masterpiece, which ushers in the new age of postmodernism. The studies overseas are comparatively mature, with complete set of researches on its themes, structures and narrative skills, employing various literary theories from different perspectives. Domestic study has sprung up since the publication of Nabokov’s novels in China. However, the focus of Chinese scholar is mostly on Lolita, while scarcely on Pale Fire. Even those studies on Pale Fire are mostly related with common themes in Nabokov’s other novels, such as post modernistic characteristics and narrative strategies. Most of domestic researchers didn’t go deep enough in the excavation of the Pale Fire and until now there is still no dissertation specializing in the study of the author’s intrusion and unreliable narrator in the novel.Nabokov’s intrusion and creation, which spreads all over the text of Pale Fire, tips the scale of the understanding of the novel, and this thesis aims to dig out and analyze this theme in depth from the creation of unreliable narrator in this novel:firstly, narrative levels of the texts are sorted out to analyze the manifestation of the unreliable narrator in the novel; then the core unreliable narrator Kinbote is analyzed in detail, employing the concept of independent narrator in the novel put forward by Bakhtin in his Dialogism theory to explore narrator’s psychology and ideology embodied in his narration; in the end, the root cause of this unreliable narration is traced out, which results from the manifestation of Nabokov’s view on literary creation, his ideology and value system, as well as his self reference. In this process of painstaking investigation on the theme of unreliable narrator, author’s intention in the creation of such narrator is gradually clarified, which uplifts readers’comprehension of this novel to a new level.