Unnatural Narrative In Nabokov's Despair

Vladimir Nabokov(1899-1977)is a well-renowned Russian-born American stylist,a bilingual novelist and an outstanding lepidopterist.Nabokovian works including Lolita,Pale Fire,Pnin,Ada or Ador,and Speak,Memory have gained international popularity throughout the past decades.By contrast,Despair,his early-born yet late-mature novel,has long been overlooked and marginalized by academia and critics despite of its significant potential value.Taking the newly-developing unnatural narratology as the point of departure,this thesis canvasses the unnatural temporal arrangement,the unnatural spatial construction,and the narrator-related aspects(including unnatural narrator,insane mind and unnatural narrative persons)in Despair,hoping to reveal Nabokov's concept of artistic creation behind unnatural representations.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One introduces the life of Nabokov,his Despair along with related researches abroad and at home,and most importantly,some core concepts of unnatural narratology.Chapter Two emphasizes the unnatural temporal orders of Despair.The anachrony of the successive temporal order of the events in the story is reflected on the innovative usage on paralipses and the achrony of proleptic analepsis and analeptic prolepsis;Abnormal beginning,peculiar progression and surprising ending on the pseudo-temporal order of the arrangement of events in the narrative also infract traditional reading anticipation.Chapter Three concentrates on the spatial structure.Merged spaces in Despair syncretize past and future,and thereby devise a diachronic genre of spatial narrative with proleptic function;denarrated spaces deconstruct paradigms of integrate and successive space on the level of discourse in order to highlight fictionality.The specious mythological metaphors and the abnormal phenomenon of mind splitting inside the Freudian dream spaces and hallucination spaces are parodies on the interpretation of dreams and pansexualism.Chapter Four focuses on the unnatural representations of the narrator,narrator's mind and perspective conversions.To begin with,the narrator Hermann's deception on the readers highlights the uncertainty of denarration;Hermann's claim to the authority of Despair represents his invasiveness.In the next place,Hermann's unreadable mind is reflected on the way he handles with marriage crisis,his understanding on oneness different from Ardalion's,and his delusional resemblance to Felix.Lastly,on conversions of perspective,the arbitrary shifts between experiencing self and narrating self together with the free swings betwixt perspectives somehow violate conventional reading habits and evoke effect of defamiliarization.The standard form and autotelic form of second person add to the charm of the unnatural textChapter Five summarizes the main points of the second,the third and the fourth chapter,and indicates the limitation of this thesis.It concludes the unnatural narrative techniques that Nabokov adopts in Despair,as well as the antimimetic artistic viewpoint it conveys.Through the prism of unnatural narratology,we are able to inspect the innovative spatiotemporal construction and his distinctive narrative techniques,so as to peep at his individuality and originality.