Between Reality And Fiction:a Narratological Exploration Of Nabokov’s Works

As a famous American novelist, Vladimir Nabokov wrote many prominent works. Among them, Lolita is the best known and it is considered the best work of Nabokov. Pale Fire is an experimental work, causing more controversies than even Lolita. Despair was primarily written in the early period of his writing career. It was not published in English firstly. Its English version was printed after Nabokov translated and revised it many times. This is a novel of art. Thesis will analyze the three novels from the perspective of Genette’s Narratology. Gerard Genette is an eminent French narratologist. He prompted Narratology to its climax. He divided the narrative into three levels:the story, the narrative and the narrating. The story refers to the content of the narration; the narrative is the narrated text and the narrating refers to the act of narration. To analyze a work from the perspective of narratology is to analyze the relationships of these three levels. In order to explore these relationships, Genette points out three aspects by collecting and re-dividing the theories of other narratologists:the tense of the narrative, the mood of the narrative and the voice of the narrative. The tense of the narrative mainly deals with the temporal relationships between the narrative and the story. The mood of the narrative deals with the modalities of the narrative and mainly analyzes from the perspective of distance and perspective. The voice of the narrative deals with the way in which the narrating itself is implicated in the narrative.Through analyzing the three works in those aspects mentioned above, the thesis reveals that the characters in the works fluctuate between reality and fiction. They live in a world with both the real and the fictive. The three works are from different phases of Nabokov’s writing career, representing different writing styles. Thus we can easily deduce that Nabokov successfully conveys the meaning he wants to express through the work by utilizing this method of lingering between reality and fiction.