The Journey to the Centre of Uncertainty: Narrative Styles in Nabokov's Pnin

Abstract

Such a devoted lepidopterist was Vladimir Nabokov that he transferred his passion onto his narrative principles as well, changing the literary devices in his works the same way a butterfly flies from one flower to another. This is especially evident in Pnin, a novel comprised of a number of vignettes and viewpoints. According to Paunovi?, those styles include the omniscient narrator, the first person narrator and the third kind of a narrator – the one who is neither the protagonist nor the author. He also claims that the shifting perspective is deliberate and that it aims to show that the reality is not such a sure and undeniable category – Pnin has his own version of it, as well as the narrator, and it is up to the reader to choose the one he likes best, or even better, to create his own.