The marginal imagination: Exile and narrative in Vladimir Nabokov's American novels

This thesis analyzes the relation between the condition of exile and the development of narrative forms in Vladimir Nabokov's American novels. Examining five main examples--The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Ada--it argues that the ruptures which exile produces, between past and present and between self and a cultural Other, increasingly interfere with the ability of narrative to achieve wholeness or a satisfying and consummating close.; The early Nabokov saw narrative as offering a synthesis between forward movement and the interpretive understanding of the past. This synthesis was always problematic, since it was only enabled by the exertion of power. In Nabokov's English-language fiction, though, it is subject to unbearable strain. Time and change are more and more seen as a meaningless unravelling, and the temptation to take refuge in fixed images of the past grows. The activities of reading and interpretation are mocked by the texts. And the self is increasingly isolated from Otherness; frustration dominates the erotics of the novels. Tropes of division multiply, and the represented boundaries grow more and more firm.; As opposed to the Nabokov seen by many "post-modernist" critics--a writer whose texts show the joyous liberation of language from referentiality--the thesis presents a more melancholy Nabokov, whose works show the self in painful isolation from a "beyond" where truth and meaning lie.