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

Milica Milovanović
Additional contact information
Milica Milovanović: English Department, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade

European Journal of Language and Literature Studies Articles, 2017, vol. 3

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 Paunović, 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.

Keywords: Nabokov; Pnin; narration; narrative styles; lepidopterist (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://brucol.be/index.php/ejls/article/view/8501 (text/html)
https://brucol.be/files/articles/ejls_v3_i3_17/Milica.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eur:ejlsjr:133

DOI: 10.26417/ejls.v9i1.p96-100

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Journal of Language and Literature Studies Articles from Revistia Research and Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Revistia Research and Publishing ().