| Nabokov wrote in a time when the sense of order, significance and reality was disappearing, a time in which contemporary science and knowledge problematize the understanding of reality. The traditional concepts of time and space are no longer valid. Therefore, fiction rejects pre-formed views of reality and the conventions of the traditional novel. The fictional manuscripts in Despair and Lolita reveal the narrators' confessions of their crimes: murder and rape. However, these stories are almost a pretext to display a great number of mechanisms which reveal the artificiality of novelistic conventions.; Each novel is based on Hermann and Humbert's supposedly true memoirs, but while reading the novel one finds out that what the narrators say is not corroborated by what the other characters say or do. Moreover, there are different perspectives on the events given by the same narrator. Both novels are based on Doppelganger stories. This motif occurs when characters who are alike play a symmetrical role and blur the frontiers between reality and illusion. In these two novels the double supposedly bears a great resemblance to his prototype, though this is not actually true. When reading Nabokov's novels Despair and Lolita one realizes that they are loaded with many repetitions either as mise en abyme or as repeated images. Besides, repetitions match the hero's personality perfectly, as both protagonists are supposedly insane. Structural repetitions remind the reader of the novels' artificiality. These reiterations prove that their pattern is carefully premeditated. This leads the reader not to rely on the world these novels depict because s/he discovers an artificial order.; Nabokov is truly a metafictional writer because he is constantly revealing the artificiality of his work by means of these devices. He proves with these novels, Despair and Lolita, that the basic assumptions which served to depict reality by means of a diary are questionable. Moreover, Nabokov parodies the conventions of realism and invites the reader to laugh with him. |
