Nabokov’s Experiments and the Nature of Fictionality

The case of a character in a novel bearing the name or likeness of its nonfi ctional creator dramatizes the fault line that separates fi ction from nonfi ction, a distinction more durable than many care to acknowledge yet not as unbridgeable as others would aver. We can get a sense of what is at stake in this distinction by glancing at the way Nabokov begins his afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “After doing my impersonation of the suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book” (1970: 313). One of the great intellectual achievements of modern narrative theory was to establish a fundamental differentiation between the narrator and the author and to ensure that the positions advocated by the one are not simplistically and erroneously pred-