Vladimir shares a similar background with the flesh-and-blood Nabokov. Like Nabokovhe was born in April of 1899 in a rosy-stone house in the Morskaya in St. Petersburg andlater became an Anglo-Russian writer of note, professor, and an expert in butterflies. He isarrogant, athletic and has enormous self-assurance. However, unlike Pnin, he shares lessNabokov‘s artistic, cultural, and political convictions. What‘s more, he is something of aplayboy often attracted by beautiful young women just as he inadvertently confesses that he―always liked, however, Varvara, the seedy philosopher‘s exuberant buxom wife‖ (119). Liza, one of thebeautiful young women at a blooming age of 20, is captivated by Vladimir.
Vladimir met Liza in 1920s at a party held by exiled intellectuals. She was then astriking-looking young medical student with eyes affecting ―us in a delayed and cumulative burst oflight when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides and its lenses and lamps are installedin the dark‖ (43). The second time they met, Vladimir found Liza ―glance on me with a mockingand mysterious persistence‖ (180). And later Vladimir ―suggests she let me see those poems again insome quieter place‖ (180). According to Vladimir‘s report it was Liza who took the first step tocreate opportunity for the meeting of the two. But if we look at the development of the eventsmore carefully, it was Vladimir who took advantage of Liza‘s inexperience of social life andher poetic passion of writing to seduce her during the meeting. Unaware of all this Liza gottrapped in Vladimir‘s love game.
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2.2 The Ethics of Storytelling as Witness: an Ambivalent Narrator
In this section, I will try to explore one dimension of the ethics of the telling in Pnin byfocusing on the narrator‘s role. According to Phelan among the four ethical positions of anarrative there are ―two involving the ethics of the telling (the narrator‘s relation to the characters, thetask of narrating, and to the audience; and the implied author‘s relation to these things) (ExperiencingFiction 11). In addition to the relations as we have analyzed in the first section, the ethics of anarrative is also closely related to the narrator‘s relation with the telling act, the told and hisaudience. In Nabokov‘s case, ethics of storytelling counts more than the ethics of story.
How authors write the story and how they communicate with the audience convey theirviews of the way of narrating, which also express their values. In Pnin, Vladimir‘s relationsto the telling, to the told, and to the audience actually reflect his assumptions about how torelate to audiences and meanwhile, his values of life. Therefore, the questions I will try toanswer concerning this narrator include: what‘s Vladimir‘s, as the narrator, relations withother characters and his former self? How does he feel about his relations with them? Andfinally, does the narrator achieve his goals through the narrating? What‘s the ethicalconsequence of the telling and being told?
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