Metafiction as a writing style evolved in the USA in the 1960s and became the flag-bearer of postmodernism. This marked by authors who went beyond the traditional fiction and experimented with the process in which fiction itself was created. The main aim of such fiction was to describe the culture from which it evolved. Thus, this fiction tried to criticize the moral responsibility of the moralizing literature belonging to the bourgeois class, and in doing so become “self-conscious” (Waugh 3). Thus, metafiction assumes the place of life-like fiction and unlike traditional fiction will try to enumerate the darkest flaws in the characters of the story. Metafiction assumed popularity among writers like Bath and Sterne and the then among postmodern authors like Sartre and Kafka. Among other, Vladimir Nabokov assumed prominence as a postmodern writer and a creator of metafictions (Waugh 15).
Nabokov has loomed large over the American postmodern era showed obsession for auto-represented constructions in his fictions, virtual effects and presence of the narrative text. His self-consciousness and genius as a postmodernist writer emerged in various instances (Oakley 480). Nabokov’s novels have a tendency of over exaggeration of the plot within the novel which escalates the tension in the readers and helps in “construction and deconstruction” of the novel (Waugh 14). Waugh states that the tension exists in many writings, but the “dominant function” within the text that helps it assumes metafictional character (Waugh 15). Such character within the novels of Nabokov evolves them in metafictional character.
Nabokov’s novels are metafictions (Waugh; Hutcheon). Inger Christensen had studied Nabokov’s Ada along with other authors, in order to find the “Meaning of Metafiction” (Christensen). Nabokov’s writings have been characteristic of its notion of “strangeness”. The novels are characteristic due to the protagonists’ “disturbingly conscious or semi-conscious toggle into the world of art” (Naiman 584). However, very little has been judged about the metafictional characters of the novels by Nabokov expect for that done by Christensen for Nabokov’s Ada. This paper will study Nabokov’s two most popular novels Lolita and Pale Fire and understand if they are examples of metafictions.
In order to understand Pale Fire and Lolita as examples of metafiction, it is important to understand what metafiction is. Metafiction is one of the most important tools for novel criticism. Metafiction, according to Linda Hutcheon is “fiction about fiction” i.e. a novel that “includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity.” (1). Thus, metafiction is a fiction that is concerned with the nature of fiction itself (Petitjean). The emphasis of the author of metafiction is more on the ontology of the fiction rather than on its epistemology.
Patricia Waugh has explained that postmodern writers face a dilemma of representing the world as they realize that “the world… cannot be ‘represented’” rather is the “discourses” of the world that can be represented through literary fiction (3). This dilemma is alleviated by metafictions. Metafiction allows a novelist to relate a fiction within a fiction and allow the reader to draw from their literary reading and construct the world. As has been mentioned by Waugh, “Metafiction may concern itself… with particular conventions of the novel, to display the process of their construction.” (Waugh 4) The world within the fictional novel is constructed in collaboration with the reader and with the latter full knowledge (Petitjean). Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction is: “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” (2)
Thus, metafiction relates to those kinds of fiction that deliberately draws a line between reality and fiction, however realistic they are, and therefore may become introverted in essence.
Metafiction is often associated with modern fictions with extreme auto-representation tendencies. Waugh has commented that metafictions have flourished in the last “twenty years” indicating time since early nineteenth century; however, she admits that the practice is ‘old’ and largely, “inherent in all novels” (Waugh 5). Metafictions are typical for their “contemporary emergence” and due to its relevance to the literary history and the insights such work offers to the “representational nature of nature of all fiction” (Waugh 5).
Novels enumerate the inconsistencies and variance of style and structure that defiance of any definition. Metafictional novels are those which “tend to be constructed on the principle of fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion.” (Waugh 6) Thus, a Metafictional novel creates fiction, narrates how this fiction was created, and thus amalgamates ‘creation’ and ‘criticism’ in order to interpret and deconstruct the whole story (Waugh 6). This juxtaposing process is apparent in metafictional novels, essentially in the postmodern novels, due to the insecurity, self-inquiring, and pluralistic culture of the time. Therefore, Waugh used metafiction and postmodernism as synonymous. Given this background of metafiction, this paper will evaluate Pale Fire and Lolita as metafictional novels. The research paper aims to answer the question are Lolita and Pale Fire by Nabokov metafictions.
Pale Fire consists of four parts – a Forward by Charles Kinbote, the poem “Pale Fire” by John Shade, a commentary of the poem by Kinbote, and the Index (Nabokov). The novel begins with, “Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.” (Nabokov 1) The very beginning of the forward written by Kinbote starts with a subtle hint of mockery “a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines” (Boyd 17). The second paragraph has such phrases like “Your favourite …” when the readers have just begun to read the book and in such a way when it is “absurd to prejudice another’s taste” (Boyd 18).
The play of realism, metaphor, images, and allusions comes alive in the passages of the novel through the self-conscious issue of reality versus fictional (Isaacs 317). The first two lines from the poem “Pale Fire” presents a categorical engagement with the reader as if it asks the reader to interpret the puzzle embedded in the text: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane;/ I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I/ Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.” (Nabokov 15) Isaacs has pointed out that Nabokov has tried to establish a “generic type of engagement” with the readers and challenge the readers to “interpret the image(s), thereby solving the puzzle or enigma, in order to arrive at an understanding of what is signified (317). Isaacs points out that a “radical opsis in a lyric” is a riddle that actually is intended to decompose the text to a visual form and helps in making sense of it, and that is what Shade’s opening lines have tried to do (Isaacs 318). Boyd has pointed out that the 1000th line of the poem is actually the first line itself and Shade was unable to revise the poem finally for he was killed before he “had the chance to finish the revision” (Boyd 76).
Life and death itself has been dealt with irony in the novel. First Nabokov has death the death of Hazel in a few pages and with little pathos and compassion, rather it has been described through “Shade’s disciplined couplets,” and “ironical and the farcical in hazel Shade’s life and death.” (Rampton 151). Thus, suicide in Pale Fire is reminded not by Hazel Shade’s stepping “Into a crackling, gulping swamp” (Nabokov, 47) but through Kinbote’s annotations on Zemblan’s thoughts to end his life. This actually presents limited details of the tragedy fo hazel’s death, Nabokov deliberately reduces the reader’s involvement which leaves one to believe that he intended to “set up a locus of symbolic sorrow and loss than anything else” (Rampton 151).
The sense of reality in the novel becomes bleak, as Shade dies an “absurd death” in the hand of a madman, Jack Grey, who aimed to shoot a man who simply resembled Judge Goldsworth. The absurdity of Shade’s death is accentuated when “another madman appropriates it to form the basis for his Jakob Gradus fantasy” as he had stolen Shade’s work to meet his “megalomaniac ends” (Boyd 77). In the poem, Shade describes his perfect and orderly life, even after his daughter’s death. However, Boyd points out that the missing final couplet represents a “mocking chaos” and not a perfectly “ordered cosmos” (78).
The antithesis of the plot is reached in the final lines of the commentary that leaves the reader appalled by Shade’s sudden death; however, Kinbote tries to distract the readers through the expression of his concerns to hide the poem. Boyd has pointed out: “Because Grey suddenly calls into question not only the Gradus story but Zembla itself, we find it hard to pay Shade’s death sufficient attention.” (Boyd 78). Through this chaotic and absurd representation of death, Nabokov has explained the very reality of death and its absoluteness. Shade’s poem initially presents the “positives form” in the first arc wherein there evolves the orderly, tranquillity with which he ends his poem, and in the second arc he presents the antithesis, the “negative-counter curve” which relates his murder and its consequences i.e. his “uncompleted poem, his travestied life, work, and death” (Boyd 233). Nabokov deliberately puts in the mayhem and disorderly situation of Gradus’s and Kinbote’s as juxtaposed against Shade’s orderly world. This return of the chaos in an orderly life and the absurdity of life itself are reflected with a transgression from Shade, his death, to Gradus and Kinbote, which essentially exemplifies the metafictional element of the novel. The metafiction in Pale Fire is accentuated through the thought that Nabokov suggests, “… it might be possible that there is a deliberate design behind our world that we cannot yet see” which brings forth the oppositions of fiction and reality atypical of a metafictional novel.
The metafictional element of Pale Fire lies in Nabokov’s intention, like that of Shade, to spin a fiction around the fate that he would be least likely to choose if he were given a choice. Like Shade, Nabokov spins a tale around his worst losses he suffered:
“Just as Shade shapes his account of his life around the worst loss he had to suffer, so Nabokov constructs Pale Fire around his own losses and fears: as a father and son, he transmutes his fears for his son’s life into Shade’s grief for his daughter’s death, and recasts the bungled assassination in which his father was shot as the killing of Shade himself; as an exile, he mourns with Kinbote his enforced escape from the distant northern land whose language and landscape were indeed once his to command. Somehow, he manages to turn a father murdered and a homeland lost into the keys to a radiantly munificent design.” (Boyd 236).
Pale Fire is a work that adheres to “transtextuality” i.e. “everything which puts [the text] into an obvious or secret relation with other texts” (Palimpsestes cited in Pier 12). Transtextuality present in fiction provides the intense relation between two or more texts. In Pale Fire (1962) Nabokov presents text within texts and it assumes fundamental importance to the novel’s structure. The test that is embedded within the novel is a semi-autobiographical poem of nine cantos written by the protagonist John Shade named “Pale Fire”. The metafictional character that is evident in the novel is found in the critical apparatus employed by Nabokov to describe the poem in terms of a “Forward”, “Commentary”, and “Index”. Kinbote comments upon the poem. The ambiguity in the text presented by Kinbote and in the poem is apparent to the reader. Kinbote’s ambiguity is expressed through his personal text as he takes “fanciful liberties” to comment on Shade’s poem, and soon diverts from the Shade’s theme of death, loss, and love to a fictitious kingdom of Zembla of which he images himself – Kinbote – to be the king and presently living in exile. Waugh points out that “The fictional content of the story is continually reflected by its formal existence as text, and the existence of that text within a world viewed in terms of ‘texuality’.” (Waugh 15) Such text within text concept is essentially a postmodernist application as such content within the novel poses questions regarding the nature and existence of reality and therefore is ontological. Pier points out that Nabokov has deliberately brought in paratextualizations within the main text in order provide a “disruptive introduction” and the “textualization of the paratext” wherein the original text amalgamates with the paratext, but the latter retains its original character (Pier).
The interplay of text within a text is done to the paramount in Pale Fire. Shade writes in “Pale Fire” in lines 407-8 where Shade describes the climatic upheaval in the poem, Shade presents another story: “It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane/ Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.” (Nabokov) Shade characterizes the year 1958 through this couplet and symbolically this is year Nabokov’s Lolita was published. Boyd has pointed out that Nabokov deliberately tried to present the readers with a “cryptic signal” about his novel wherein Shade knows Lolita only as a natural phenomenon (Boyd 239). In line 413 of “Pale Fire”, Kinbote notes that Shade had first placed “the lighter and more musical: ‘A nymphet pirouetted’” instead of “A nymph came pirouetting”. (Nabokov 156) This personal touch of “Nabokovian Wood Nymph” present in the novel shows the metafictional play of texts within texts and then embedded texts within.
Narrations within the narration and comments about the text within the novel provide an acute picture of a metafiction (Isaacs 325). The Commentary by Kinbote presents the discretional power that he uses over the poem within the novel. Kinbote has put italics on the relevant lines of the poem in order to make the meaning more clearly to the reader (Nabokov 131). These are indications of what Kinbote was doing in the commentary by drawing attention of the reader to Shade. Moreover, through the misleading notes to the couplets that Kinbote has put, he draws our attention to Nabokov himself and through these that he “announces his presence” (Isaacs 325). In the final paragraph of the Commentary Kinbote is removed and Nabokov emerges out of the novel in order to distinguish himself from the fictional Kinbote: “I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist, I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans fortune, sans audience, sans anything but his art.” (Nabokov 212) Further, there is the character called Pinn who falls between the novel Lolita and Pale Fire, who makes a “self-reflexive cameo appearance” and largely is a representation of Nabokov himself (Isaacs 325).
Pale Fire is a metafiction due to the presence of “narratorial intrusion” in such a way that the novel assumes the position of a “self-begetting novel” and focus of the readers are attracted to the irony in the narrator, as has been observed in case of Kinbote and Shade instead of an explicit and implicit irony in text. Metafiction assumes these characters of irony in the narrator and the irony lies in the alienation from the external reality through usage of “linguistic structure” and “continuous involvement”. Thus, Nabokov deliberately uses the genre of western thrillers or detective novels in order to explore the loss of self-identity (Waugh 85). Nabokov leaves it to the reader to interpret the novel, as it is unclear whether the first person narrator is Kinbote, or Botkin or the King of Zembla. In addition, the poem “Pale Fire” at times appears to be the biography of Kinbote who is probably Charles the Beloved or King of Zembla or the poem is not at all about Kinbote. Waugh posses the question, “… is the poem about him at all? Or is everything an invention not only of Nabokov himself but of a hallucinated psychotic?” (Waugh 85) The absurdity of Shade’s death accentuates the metafictional quality of the novel through the play of “absurd” doubles by the murderer who assumes him as someone else. Waugh presents the possibility that the pursuer of Kinbote is actually a part of his “mad self”, which ultimately becomes the basis and hindrance to art and who ultimately destroys the artist in Shade.
Lolita, published in the mid nineties mired due to initial controversy regarding the content of the plot (Clegg 8). The story revolves around the Humbert Humbert, a European in America and his obsession for a twelve year old girl. The novel is a metafiction. The metafictional character evident in the novel arises definitely through the characterization of Lolita. Clegg posses the question, “Who is Lolita? What happens to Lolita? How do we read Lolita through Humbert’s obsessional narrative?” (Clegg 115) The reason for these questions are evident, as Lolita leaves readers confused about her existence, if she is a “real” girl pivotal to the plot of the novel or just the effect of language.
The metafictional character of Lolita lies in its “textual game” presented in the novel similar to the genre of detective thriller novels. Lolita is similar to Pale Fire as it appears to be a novel with a Forward, as the latter appears to be a poem with a Forward and Commentary. There are multiple texts embedded in the novel in form of letters, poems, magazine pages, signage (of motels, shops, roads, etc.), maps, pages from diaries, etc. Humbert presents ‘Exhibition Number Two”, his personal diary, which had been reconstructed from a “photographic memory”, makes the reader sceptical about its content:
“I remember the things so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections)… then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic hand…” (Nabokov, Lolita 55)
The narration of Humbert largely helps in convincing the readers that the text within the reproduced diary is not trustworthy. The repetition of words like “perhaps” presents uncertainty even on Humbert’s part in the reproduction of the text. As the readers go through Lolita, they get a feel that Humbert’s account is incomplete and requires the collaboration of the reader for completion.
Anthony Moore points out that “Writers of metafictions expose the very artificiality of the novel genre and its conventions and, at the same time, flaunt conspicuous awareness of the presence of their readers in the imaginative process of reading.” (76) Nabokov does this in Lolita. In Lolita Humbert is in a struggle with “fictive structures” and feels frustrated to write an autobiography. Thus, Humbert’s frustration in writing his own account is apparent and the incompleteness of Lolita is presented “As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc.” (Nabokov, Lolita 65). This leaves the readers confused as to “their errors of interpretation how to reconstruct his seriously flawed literary universe through the fictive referents of his words, and thus to minimize further error in their reading” (Moore 76).
Lolita is a “mockery” of the reader and their perception of reality and fiction, which adds to the metafiction essence of the novel (Hutcheon 143). The novel makes demand on the readers to imagine the existence of the world of the novel and its characters. The novel stands out in its approach of Humbert’s “nymphet love” (159) and through which it “taunts” the readers to reduce their conventional expectations out of the novel and begin using their interpretational skills.
“Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tender hearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential page!! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little” (p. 129)
Thus, Humbert tries to delude the reader in his own existential ideas; the reader’s senses become stronger and thus help them to interpret the text from different angles. Such explicit taunting of the readers by the narrator is atypical of authors like Nabokov and Bath who adopt this as a
“process of ordering, interpreting, and imaginatively “concretizing” is the same … but reading is either allegorized as a creative process shared with the author, … or it is actually made so disruptive and challenging as to force the reader, if he is to read at all, to so that ordering, interpreting, and imagining for himself.” (Hutcheon 143-4).
The other metafictional characters evident in Lolita lie are Humbert’s annotations and interpolations of the plot that obstructs the stylistic rendition of the novel as a “sexual plot”. “This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning” (Nabokov, Lolita 140). Humbert possess the narrative in Part One and at the beginning of Part two, but as Dolores assumes the form of reality through the letters written by her, the nymphet illusion is shattered. This is where the writer of the text i.e. Humbert tries to recreate his invention and make it the “upper layer of composition” (Moore 77). Thus, Lolita through her letter to Humbert – “I have gone through much sadness and hardship./ Yours expecting,/ Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)” (266) – evolves as the young woman rather than Humbert’s nymphet as leaves Humbert in agony: “I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me.” (267). In the end Humbert realizes, as Hutcheon points out, “that he can only possess Lolita, only make her live, imaginatively, in a diegetic erotic version shared with the reader.” (Hutcheon 85)
The metafictional character of Lolita and Pale Fire lie in the explicit coordination of the reader and the writer to form the story, as the true essence of metafiction. Hutcheon has stated that “The reader must work to decipher the test as hard as the writer did to cipher it, with the result that the stress of the work is displaced from the communicating of a message to the inciting to produce meaning, as well as order.” (Hutcheon 144). Metafictional character of the novel Lolita is enhanced by the constant references of other texts like letters, the novel of Humbert, Forward by Professor Ray, etc, within the novel, which reduces the fictive character of the text (Clegg 114).
There are references of book in the fictitious text like “Don Quixote” “Les Miserables”, “Le Beauté Humaine” etc. to play with the reality-fiction game employed in metafictional novels. Then Humbert refers to ‘Annabel Lee’ the poem by Edgar Allan Poe in order to describe the Annabel his first crush (Frosch 40). The reference of the poem is implicit in Humbert’s narration and the reader is half-sure that it actually is what he thinks. A direct quote from Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” has been made when Humbert tries to explain his occasional desire to marry Haze and become Dolores’s stepfather: “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss…” (67). There is a presence of parody in Lolita adds to the novel as metafictional. Hutcheon states, “Parody is, therefore, an exploration of difference and similarity: in metafiction it invites a more literary reading, a recognition of literary codes.” (Hutcheon 25) Through parody, Nabokov invites readers to explore the essence of his creation in the novel and creates an involvement with the readers transgressing the characters. Humbert uses “Ash Wednesday” by Eliot to create the “death sentence” parody (Frosch 45).
Nabokov has repeatedly used text-within-text through the poems written by Humbert. Parody assumes an important position in the text of Nabokov and that of Lolita. There is often a play of “doubleness” in Nabokovian novels as has been observed in Lolita: “… double serves as a second-order reality, or parody The double Quilty parodies Humbert who parodies Edger Allan Poe.” (Frosch 46) Nabokov mentions in the afterword that the inspiration for the story has been drawn from the story of an ape when taught to draw drew the picture of his cage, and Humbert in many cases has been called an ape. Nabokov tries to show that Humbert being the ape, the parody presents the sketch of his emotional and illusory imprisonment through his artistic rendition of the novel (Frosch 46). Through the parodies and text-within-texts, Nabokov presents a quaint sense of reality and fiction in the minds of the readers. The readers, like Humbert are trapped in the illusory world of fiction and try to find out the reality like a true detective.
Nabokov masterfully presents a contradiction between the reality and fantastic. Nabokov has pointed out in the Afterward to Lolita that reality means, “… one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” (Nabokov, Lolita 314). Thus, Nabokov tries to portray a surreal world where he asks the reader to distinguish between fantasy and imitation of reality (Olsen 117). Olsen thus points out: “What one finds, then, at the heart of Lolita is a struggle for power between two competing modes of discourse. On the one hand strives the realistic, whose desire is to imitate the world of chronos and to embrace all its premises. On the other hand strives the fantastic, whose desire is to subvert the notion of “consensus-reality.”” (124) Thus, the presence of Nabokov’s “playful metafiction” and obscurity of the text is evident.
Metafiction lies in the essence of Lolita and Pale Fire. Lolita essentially assumes its metafictional character through fictional narrative in which the author leaves the reader to oscillate between to possible hypothesis (Marcus 202). That is why the readers constantly have to re-examine their assumptions regarding the plot. Pale Fire on the other hand is a narrative metafiction. The characters, which are common in both the novels, are in the presence of text-with-text and parody in the novels (Frosch 42). The desperation and nostalgia observable in the narrators of both the novels i.e. Humbert and Kinbote are evident. Parody is a common element found in both Pale Fire and Lolita that are used to present both the novels properties relevant to detective fiction, as both the novels end in murder. Hutcheon mentions in this relation “The stylized properties of detective fiction-when either parodied overtly or covertly used as structural principles- are employees to point to the text in its existence as literature, as patterned, ordered art.” (Hutcheon 74) Further, the loss of identity and self in the play of fiction and reality is evident in both the renditions of Nabokov and they seek, in true postmodernist sense, increases the engagement of the author with the readers. Thus, the characters of metafictions are evidently present in the rendition of both the novels.
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