In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work.
Is there life after death? Can we attain any knowledge about the otherworld? Nabokov explores this question through his personal tragedy of having to become an English-language novelist after writing nine novels in Russian. Through connections to English-language writers such as Nathanael Hawthorne, Henry James, William James and many others, Nabokov’s ghost story of the half-brothers Sebastian and V. approaches the brink from which the unknowable can be dimly glimpsed.
The novel’s ambiguous conclusion demands a rereading, which leads to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable, using methods Nabokov later deploys in Lolita and Pale Fire. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable.

Translated by: Vera Polishchuk