Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions: Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious

Abstract

Defining the unconscious in a Husserlian manner as that which appears through reproductive acts of consciousness, this article attempts to investigate how Vladimir Nabokov tackles this theme in Pnin both as a stylist and as a storyteller. Nabokov understands literature as the art of language that imposes lived experiences on readers, and he achieves literary representations of the unconscious in Pnin by juxtaposing experiences containing tacit expectations that are incongruent with one another. Tracking the scenes where Pnin performs reproductive acts throughout the novel, it is found that the unconscious functions as a thematic pattern in Pnin and mirrors the protagonist’s progress in his quixotic war against cruelty and callousness in the world.