A "Crystal Land" Of Mind

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977), a Russian-born American literary giant, has written a large number of works during his life-long literary career. His world-wide reputation is established by his magnificent novels, such as Lolita, Pnin, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, and Pale Fire. Above all, Pale Fire is the most intricately-designed and the most uniquely-structured work ever seen, which is beyond the conventional definition of novel. The novel Pale Fire is composed of four parts: a foreword, a 999-line poem in heroic couplet, a commentary, and an index. The four parts are intertwined together, and the meaning of the novel can only be found through joining the four parts together. The novel has an unprecedented form, for it combines poem with prose, and synthesizes poem with academic criticism. Hence, it is an innovative experiment of new novel in the 20th century.Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who is called the"French Freud,"is an outstanding French psychoanalyst and structuralist. He re-reads Freud's theories with the help of Roman Jakobson's and Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theories. Lacan claims that the unconscious is structured like the structure of language, which can be systematically analyzed. In Lacan's model, the unconscious is not instinctual, but it is the discourse of the Other—language, cultural norms and laws in Symbolic Register. Concerning self-identity, Lacan asserts that all individuals are fragmented, and no one is whole. The ideal concept of wholeness and complete self is only an illusion that is unattainable.The extant researches concentrate on the discussion of the novel's distinctive narrative artifice, post-modernism features and unique artistic techniques and so on. Nevertheless, the focus of this thesis switches from the traditional research aspects to a new angle. This thesis analyzes two narrators in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire: Kinbote and Shade, and explores their unconscious regions of psyche as well as the processes of seeking self from the angle of Lacanian psychoanalytic theories. The thesis unfolds Nabokov's approval of the modern people's identity crisis, and further discovers the master's unique insight of this issue and distinctive expressions.Through the comparison between Kinbote and Shade, two conclusions could be summed up. The first one is that the individual is seeking his or her self in the society, but self-identity is only the Other's discourse, and the Other is always in the center of the world while the individual is in the marginal position. As what Kinbote has experienced, many modern men cannot establish their self-identities, and a wholly unified and psychologically complete individual is only an illusion. The second conclusion is that Nabokov does not only disclose the universal truth of the alienation of the modern people in his novel, but further attempts to find out the ways to help people to overcome the terror and pain of identity loss as what Shade has done in the novel. Shade is trying his best to seek his self-identity all his life, and finally he succeeds by the other—his wife; and by his created"crystal land"—the poem"Pale Fire."...