Summary

Our narrator, V., begins with Sebastian Knight's birth on December 31st, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, the former capital of Russia. In his typically digressive, idiosyncratic manner, V. tells us of learning what the weather was like on the day of Sebastian's birth and describes Russia's clear cold mornings. He explains that he was born in the same house as Sebastian six years later to the same father but a different mother (his father had married his mother after divorcing Sebastian's). In his first of many jabs at Mr. Goodman's biography of Sebastian Knight, V. finds fault with Goodman's description of Sebastian's family. V. corrects some (perhaps minor) factual details before offering his own portrait of the family, dwelling especially on his and Sebastian's father, a gallant man whom V. sees as a major influence on Sebastian's writing.

We learn the history of Sebastian's parents -- from the meeting between Sebastian and V.'s father and Virginia Knight, to the circumstances of their separation (Virginia runs off with another man), to his remarriage to V.'s mother. Sebastian and Virginia met again only once years later, unbeknownst to his father, before she died of heart failure.

V. recalls that his parents marriage was very happy, though his father was very jealous of Virginia, going so far as to start a duel with a man named Palchin who gossipped about her. He was shot in the duel and died from complications. V. introduces Sebastian's description of the death before turning again to Mr. Goodman's treatment of Sebastian's childhood. He argues that Goodman, as the author's mere secretary, missed the essence of Sebastian's upbringing -- a delicate balance of Russian and the European culture.

V. then recalls several childhood memories of Sebastian. In each, he tries to be noticed by or even to play with Sebastian, but each time he is rebuffed, in the normal way an older child rebuffs an annoying younger sibling. He remembers Sebastian impatiently helping him with his lessons and relates stealing a peek at Sebastian's early verse, which he hid away and signed with a doodle of a chess knight rather than his name. V. admits that his portrait of his brother is imperfect, owing to Sebastian's aloofness.

He thus turns to an account of his research into Sebastian's life. V. writes that he visited Lausanne to speak with the woman who used to be his and Sebastian's governess; he found her at a sort of nursing home. This interview was disappointing, for the governess's sentimental remembrances of Sebastian ring false. When he left, he was saddened to realize that she did not ask him a single question about Sebastian's later life or recent death.

We learn that Sebastian, V. and V.'s mother fled the Russian Revolution in 1918. V. and his mother bribed someone for a train ticket to Finland and waited for the train while Sebastian and Captain Belov, an old friend, attempted to bring their luggage. Sebastian arrived moments before the train departed, without luggage, and explained that Belov and others, including Palchin, had been arrested but that he had escaped.

This story leads into a passage from Sebastian's last book, The Doubtful Asphodel, about a man's escape from and "unnamed country of terror and misery." Though Mr. Goodman used this passage as an example of Sebastian's hatred for his homeland, V. belittles this view, and quotes another passage where Sebastian speaks of how any exile must long for his homeland. Whatever Sebastian's complicated feelings, V. feels certain that he was as saddened by their desperate departure as he or his mother.

After living for a short time in Finland, V. and his mother left for Paris and Sebastian left for Cambridge University. They parted in a small hotel room, and in the next three years Sebastian visited only twice, the second time for his step-mother's funeral. Still, V. explains, he and his mother spoke of Sebastian often, relating Sebastian's adventures -- such as his eastward journey with the futurist poet Alexis Pan and his wife Larissa. In each town they stopped in, Alexis gave an artistic performance, attempting thereby to pay their way. Alexis' excessive drinking undermined the plan, and their trip ended with Alexis penniless and his wife arrested for slapping a policeman. Sebastian returned home, completely unembarrassed by his strange journey. Though Pan became briefly popular with the Bolsheviks, he committed suicide only a few years after the Revolution.

V. remembers his mother commenting that she never really understood Sebastian, though she always "tried to be kind to the boy." Sebastian's sole visit to Paris was odd, as Sebastian had awkwardly embraced all things English. When he came for his step-mother's funeral, he suggested that V. come to England, but V. refused, saying that he wanted to stay in Paris with his friends. Sebastian kindly offered money and advice, then left for the south of France.

Analysis

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight begins with a heady task indeed -- Nabokov must not only establish the suspension of disbelief common to all fiction, he must also interest his reader in a fictional personage, Sebastian Knight, and his faux-biography. Moreover, Nabokov chooses the digressive, defensive V. for our narrator -- not the most reader-friendly of literary guides. Anticipating, even embracing these difficulties, Nabokov introduces right away the tension that binds the novel together: the conflict between V.'s account of things and Mr. Goodman's. This biographer's duel "proves" -- so to speak -- how interesting Sebastian Knight will be. He is after all a figure worthy of two biographies, and a mysterious, controversial figure at that. Moreover, it introduces the overarching theme of the novel. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is not about Sebastian Knight. It's about writing about Sebastian Knight -- specifically, about the two conflicting versions of his life, V.'s and Goodman's. Of course, generally, the novel is thus about the mystery, ambiguity and conflict that attends the writing of any life.

V., by the way, is not a perfect biographer, or even a good biographer. He is anything but disinterested in his subject, prefering to expose his connection to Sebastian rather than explore and explain him. This tendency is clearest, naturally, in the writing about Sebastian's family that opens the book. In fact, V.'s need to show the literary world that he knows Sebastian better than Mr. Goodman leads to some rather embarassing lapses of taste. V.'s account of their father's death, for instance, manages to disgrace their dead father doubly: both in emphasizing that Sebastian's mother left him and in stating that their father died after a duel to defend her "honor." These bits of gossip ignore the tragedy behind the exposure -- that Virginia abandoned her family, and that the father suffered from irrational jealousy (or love) for Virginia even after this abandonment. V.'s lack of insight into this episode does not bode well for his ability as an analyst of Sebastian's character. It does, however, allow the insightful reader to see V.'s desperate need for attention, however humiliating, quite clearly.

To take this a bit further, V. declares that Sebastian deserves an insightful biography -- he is trying, he says, to rescue Sebastian from Mr. Goodman's wrongheaded account. As we read into the book a bit, however, it becomes clearer and clearer that V.'s motives are not so innocent. In the sketches of their childhood, for instance, there are undertones of jealousy, anger and longing -- a younger brother's long-established jealousy of an older, famous brother, perhaps. Something fishy is going on: has V. inherited his father's obsession with honor? Does he believe that he can possess his brother in death as he couldn't in life? Or is V. simply once again breaking into Sebastian's secret drawer, attempting to air secrets that Sebastian has no intention of sharing, in an effort to belittle or defy his brother? At this point, V.'s intentions, conscious or otherwise, are unclear. What is certain: they are not motivated by good faith.

V.'s section on Russia develops this conflict between biographer and subject still further. He lashes out at Goodman's contention that Sebastian hated Russia; one feels in the anger directed at Goodman a more poignant anger directed at Sebastian, as though V. feels that Sebastian's rejection of Russia entails a rejection of V. and V.'s mother as well. Certainly V.'s description of a complicated, ambivalent, nostalgic relationship to one's homeland is plausible -- but it is V.'s, not Sebastian's. Indeed, the more V. writes, the more he attempts to inhabit Sebastian's point-of-view, the clearer it is that he is writing from his own point-of-view, taking on Sebastian's authority to assert his own importance.

Thus, in all, the first chapters of the novel offer us little in the way of getting to know Sebastian Knight, and much in the way of getting to know the complicated, flawed V. We are given a series of false starts -- V.'s attempts to work from his own memories, to work from his nanny's memories, to work from his mother's memories. Each point of entry fails. If you accept that the novel is about the halting, imperfect, perhaps even impossible process of "summing up" the life of another, you will find these first chapters an intriguing introduction to the web of Goodman, V., Sebastian and family. If, on the other hand, you look for a clean summing up, a typical biography, anticipate frustration and confusion.

Summary

V. says that he delved into his research of Sebastian two months after his death, motivated by an almost cathartic revelation that he and Sebastian had a deep filial bond that remained unexpressed during life. He even took up writing short stories to test the affinity -- his failure at the medium convinced him all the more of his similarity to Sebastian, as he declares that Sebastian too would have failed at writing such stories.

We learn that V. went through Sebastian's papers following his death. V. reluctantly complied with Sebastian's wish that two bundles of letters be burned -- but not before noticing that one bundle contained correspondence in Russian, which V. finds intriguing. He continued to examine Sebastian's apartment and belongings, filled with melancholy and nostalgia, before finding Sebastian's correspondence with himself and his mother. He realized where he next ought to go in researching Sebastian's life: to Cambridge.

V. recalls Sebastian's instant attachment to England, combined with sadness that he could never fully belong in English society. At first, Sebastian strove to do everything that the true English gentleman did, always unsuccessfully. V. locates an old friend of Sebastian's at Cambridge who relates some amusing anecdotes about Sebastian's Cambridge years, including Sebastian's friendship with a popular and witty undergrad named Gorget. This friend stated that he knew Sebastian until his third or fourth term, when Sebastian essentially dropped out of college life and began writing. He described Sebastian while writing as quite unpredictable -- melancholy for days, elated when finished with a poem. The friend relates a few more anecdotes, including an account of Sebastian's relationship with a tutor who infurited Sebastian by constantly referring to him as Russian. Sebastian finally pretended to be Hungarian only to find that the tutor spoke Hungarian.

V. then pulls a trick, stating that another friend of Sebastian's interrupted this interview, only to reveal a sentence later that there was no other friend -- that he merely wished to have the novelist's freedom in introducing different perspectives on a character.

He turns to a new interview subject, Mr. Goodman, Sebastian's secretary from 1930-4, whom V. attempted to interview without the knowledge that Goodman was publishing a Sebastian Knight biography of his own. V. introduces his account of Goodman with a slippery criticism, suggesting that Goodman exploited his relationship with Sebastian, before covering himself from a slander or libel lawsuit by saying that he does not suggest that Goodman actually exploited Sebastian. V. manages to criticize Goodman only indirectly, alluding to Sebastian's satirical treatment of another writer and indicating that he, too, cannot help but represent Goodman badly.

V. states that upon arriving at Mr. Goodman's study he learned that Goodman was unaware of his relationship to Sebastian, as Sebastian had always gone by his mother's name. V. further relates that Goodman, willing enough to provide him with some business documents, became strange and dismissive when he learned that V. was working on a book about Sebastian. He urged V. to give up his book, pretending that Sebastian, as a subject, did not merit a straight-forward treatment.

As V. left his meeting with Goodman, Helen Pratt stopped him and introduced herself as a friend of Clare Bishop's, one of Sebastian's closest friends. She mentions, moreover, that Mr. Goodman wrote a biography of Sebastian, which she stated that she disliked, having read the proofs.

Analysis

With Chapter 4, V. begins the book anew. This new start is more successful for several reasons. First, he begins follow the chronology of his investigation of Sebastian, rather than Sebastian's life, which proves much more successful -- it also, by the way, more correctly reflects the nature of the work, which is a novel about researching and writing, not actually about Sebastian. Second, V. begins Chapter Four with more confidence, moving beyond the bizarre confessions and false starts of the first three chapters to recount his catharsis following his brother's death, and to follow this catharsis in a more or less linear fashion through his interviews. V. seems willing to accept that his biography of Sebastian will be personal rahter than objective -- an admission that lends his work coherence as well as credibility.

We learn, through V.'s description of Sebastian's barren and weird apartment, the extent to which Sebastian was totally absorbed in his work. We also learn the extent to which V. does not know or understand Sebastian. Each discovery he makes is not only poignant but surprising, suggesting that V. really had no contact with Sebastian's thoughts or concerns during life.

The careful reader should take special note of the "empty talc-powder tin with violets figured between its shoulders." This is the third time that violets have been mentioned in the story. First were the "sugar-coated violets" that Sebastian's mother gave him on her one brief return visit. Second, the "small muslin bag of violet sweets" that the narrator discovered in Sebastian's locked desk drawer may well have been the same as the first. For now, simply be aware of this profusion of violets. Also be aware that V. is unaware of them; he's not the most astute of detectives. At this point in the novel it seems likely that, though V. will continue to guide us, Nabokov is inviting the reader to be the true detective in his work, to solve his puzzles despite the incompetence of V.

At Cambridge, V. learns a great deal about Sebastian, but he is clearly unhappy with the results of his interview. According to "the scholar" (the only name V. gives him), Sebastian was quite unhappy at Cambridge; furthermore, at Cambridge he came to realize that he would always be unhappy -- at least according to the conventional definition of happiness. Sebastian had two Cambridge periods: pre- and post-writing. Pre-writing Sebastian doesn't seem to have anything to do with post-writing Sebastian, though such clean breaks are always complicated. Really, the two sides of Sebastian seem to represent two manners in which he attempted to disguise his roots. Sebastian initially desired to "become" English -- to put on the mask of Englishness -- by acting English. But this was impossible. He would miss an idiom, a gesture, let his accent slip, and reveal his Russianness. But in writing, Sebastian found a more successful, sustainable "English" mask. After all, he is remembered as an English, not as a Russian writer, a fact that V. seems uneasy with, even suggesting that Sebastian expressed himself more naturally and elegantly in Russian than in English, even at the height of his career.

Turning to Mr. Goodman, V. is determined to set the reader against Mr. Goodman before introducing him. Such preliminaries seem unnecessary, for Mr. Goodman is hardly an appealing figure. Given that the reader already knows about Mr. Goodman's biography, his attempts to dismiss V. and to minimize Sebastian Knight's importance as a writer make him seem pompous, sneaky and ridiculous. In fact, V.'s need to "cushion" his presentation of Mr. Goodman with the snarky allusion to Sebastian's criticism of a similarly absurd literary figure reveals V.'s feelings of inferiority more than it undermines Goodman. V. takes umbrage behind his brother's brilliant satire -- precisely the kind of hijacking of genius that he accuses Goodman of perpetrating. Moreover, V.'s refusal to let his criticism stand, his need to protect himself from a libel suit, adds a further layer of uncertainty and inferiority. He seems to be afraid of Goodman even as he is contemptuous of him.

Then of course there is the bizarre nature of the interaction with Goodman itself. Why is Goodman wearing a mask? Why does he give it to the narrator on his way out the door? In "The Fledgling Fictionalist," Michael H. Begnal argues that V. "supplies" the mask in order to protect himself from a libel suit. In other words, V. doesn't give us the "real" Mr. Goodman in case the "real" Mr. Goodman wants to take him to court. More generally, perhaps, the mask serves merely to highlight V.'s growing attentiveness to the "masking" nature of narrative itself. Like the earlier false interpolation of the Cambridge friend who hypothetically explains it all, V. is drawing attention to the artifice of narrative, and drawing attention to his awareness of said artifice. Thus, in general, V. seems to have grown aware of his place in the work -- and of the impossibility of writing a "mask-free," i.e. objective, life of Sebastian Knight. Even so, the mask image is clumsy and confusing. Perhaps Nabokov thereby suggests that though V. is aware of fictional artifice, he still wields his knowledge in a clumsy, amateurish manner.

Summary

V. finally turns to Mr. Goodman's book, detailing its faults -- and in the process, exposing the stupidity of the reviewers who praised the book, and the tragedy that the book will survive as long as Sebastian's deserved fame does. V. paints Goodman as a witless ignoramus who accepted as pure and clean fact several of his brother's literary jokes -- such as his description of a joke first novel "about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear specialist, had murdered the student's father." Goodman misses this obvious allusion to Hamlet, and populates his book with further evidence of his density.

V. admits that while Goodman completely misses the reasons for Sebastian's "fissure" with the world, there was indeed such a fissure. Rather than the result of historical circumstances or modernity writ large, Sebastian's separation, according to V., followed from a natural shyness and intelligence that set him apart from his surroundings even as a very young child. He buttresses this observation with several passages from Sebastian's writings -- passages which Goodman apparently failed to read.

Moreover, V. reveals that Mr. Goodman had actually sent him a copy of the book, along with a strange and jokey letter about wanting the book to be a surprise. V. is thus certain that Mr. Goodman knows that his book is a fraud and knows that the narrator knows it, despite the positive reviews. Mr. Goodman also sent along the promised information about several of Sebastian's books, along with his own contract which gave him an interest in the books Sebastian wrote while he worked for him. It is clear to V. that in life as well as death Goodman had grossly taken advantage of Sebastian, who was completely naive and uninterested in matters of money.

Returning to the story of Sebastian's life, V. recalls that two years after his mother's death he accidentally met Sebastian at a Paris cafe. Sebastian appeared strangely at ease with the coincidence and introduced him to the girl he was sitting with, Clare Bishop. V. witnessed Sebastian's relationship with Clare as they discussed Sebastian's latest title; Clare found the title stupid and Sebastian accepted her criticism well and amiably. Clare and V. talked briefly outside the cafe, discussing the manner in which she and Sebastian met. V. noted the couple's quiet, casual, happy ease with one another.

We return to Miss Pratt, who, according to Sebastian, assured him that Clare would be happy to learn that her letters to Sebastian had been destroyed. Clare had been married for three years or so. When V. asked whether he might see Mrs. Bishop briefly to ask her about Sebastian, Miss Pratt told him that it would be impossible even to ask. She offered, however, to tell him everything she could about Sebastian and Clare. Thus V. learned of Clare's discovery of the other woman in his life, though Miss Pratt could not say who she was, and the decline of Sebastian's health.

Despite Miss Pratt's help, V. still felt the need to see Clare personally, so behond Miss Pratt's back he called on her. Her husband, a friendly and decent man, answered the door and gently told V. that Clare had no desire to relive her past. Two days later V. decided to try once more, certain that Clare would consent to see him. As he approached her house, he saw her leave, noticed that she was pregnant, and realized that he oughtn't to approach her. He makes one attempt to win her recognition by dropping an object in his pocket -- it turns out to be Sebastian's latch-key -- and asking if it's hers, but the nearsighted Clare shakes her head and walks on, unaware of who is asking.

V. turns to Sebastian and Clare's six-year relationship, during which Sebastian created and published his first two novels and three stories, three-fifths of his complete works. V. states that Clare and Sebastian had a warm, natural, undefined relationship. They never married, not out of unconventional resistence but because it never occured to them to change their relationship one way or another. V. tells of how Clare typed Sebastian's novels while he dictated, digressing to describe Sebastian's difficulty with words both because he had a writer's insistence upon perfect expression and because Sebastian never attained the felicity in English that he possessed in Russian. Indeed, V. says, Clare occasionally corrected Sebastian's unidiomatic English, and Sebastian accepted her improvements with mild embarrassment.

Sebastian's first novel attracted no critical notice. However, his next commenced smoothly, with Clare's help, and life was very happy indeed. After a while, Sebastian decided to holiday in Germany to help with his novel. When Clare joined him there a while later he was mysteriously missing. She waited, unconcerned, to find him strange when he returned. She asked whether he had stopped loving her and he declared that he hadn't, that he had felt a pain in his chest and arm and had gone to see a specialist. V. states that Sebastian suffered from something called "Lehmann's disease," the same heart disorder which had killed his mother. After Germany, Sebastian returned to London and worked steadily for almost a year. V. tells us that he met a friend of Sebastian's, Leslie, who described Sebastian during this time, after the completion of his second novel. She walked into his study to find him lying on the floor and Clare bundling up his papers. Sebastian said, "I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest."

Analysis

V.'s skill as a narrator grows as the chapters pass. His criticisms of Goodman's book -- and of the pseudo-psychologizing, hamfistedly-historicizing society that supports such rubbish -- are spot-on and elegantly stated. (By the way, V. channels many of Nabokov's own published opinions in these passages, including his hatred of Freudianism and his disdain for "historical" literary analysis.)

Nonetheless, Goodman's most obvious gaffe passes unmentioned: the fact that Goodman did not even realize that Sebastian had a half-brother. Of course, there is a pretty reasonable explanation for why V. stays away from this criticism -- namely, that it exposes the total unimportance of he and his mother to Sebastian's life and work. On the other hand, V. and the reader alike are well aware that Goodman's judgement of such things is suspect. He knows little to nothing of importance about Sebastian's inner life. Thus V.'s avoidance of Goodman's gaffe may stem from another motive: perhaps V. accepts his unimportance in Sebastian's life but doesn't care. He seems to have shifted as the book unfolds from writing about Sebastian to writing about Sebastian's books -- or even more, to self-consciously writing about writing. Thus V. is moving away from his earlier "mask" as Sebastian's brother and putting on a new one as Sebastian's best critic.

Aside from the talk of Goodman, the relationship that dominates these chapters is that of Clare and Sebastian. Among literary critics there is a great deal of disagreement as to how a reader should understand this relationship. Begnal, for one, suggests that Sebastian treats Clare badly, and cites their relationship as evidence that Sebastian Knight is not a paragon of virtue, though V. attempts to show him that way. However, it might be too simple to label Sebastian and Clare's relationship "bad." Even when Sebastian calls Clare an "idiot" -- when she almost steps into a bicycle's path -- one might as easily hear concern as abuse. Perhaps his overprotective, paternalistic way with Clare is not wholly fair to her, but he also takes her aesthetic sensitivity quite seriously, such as when he gravely describes the smell of pigeons. The relationship is complex and flawed -- after all, it ends badly, with "another woman" -- but also simple, warm and happy.

An undeniable part of the complexity in their relationship follows from Clare's Englishness -- which reinforces the conflict between balancing Russianness and Englishness that recurs throughout the novel. Clare epitomizes the literary tradition of upper-class feminine Englishness. Her understated prettiness, elegant manner, forgetfulness and easy-going manner are all earmarks of her nation, at least as it's been represented in fiction. Just as Sebastian fell in love with being English while at Cambridge, one might worry that he was more in love with what Clare represented than with Clare herself. Countering this worry is the fact that Clare is in many ways very similar to Sebastian. She is an orphan, she is independent, and she is quite capable of living her life as sees fit, absolutely unconcerned with anyone else's opinion of it.

Continuing the portrait of a happy yet flawed relationship, Helen Pratt, our main source of information about Clare and Sebastian, describes them as happy and loving but also as unbalanced. While Sebastian directs his energy toward his writing, Clare directs hers toward Sebastian -- a sacrifice that makes Sebastian more uncomfortable, it seems, than grateful. The very comfort of their happiness, the stifling nature that comfort can take on, draws Sebastian toward the mysterious Russian whom Helen mentions: away from light and pretty England and toward passionate and beautiful Russia.

Summary

V. describes his half-brother's body of work, asserting generally that Sebastian's novels were intended on one level as send-ups of second-rate ideas, writers, and styles; for the careful reader, however, the novels offered more profound examinations of human truths as well.

We turn to The Prismatic Bezel, Sebastian's first book, which received acclaim only after the success of his later novels. In Bezel, a detective comes to investigate a murder that has been committed in a boarding house with twelve guests; in the process of quesitoning all the people in the house realize that they are related to someone else in the group. Suddenly the boarding-house dissolves away and a country-house takes its place, the murder forgotten. The detective reappears and questioning begins anew. Just as it seems that the murderer will be discovered, the body disappears; one of the boarders removes a fake mustache and reveals himself as the man who was supposed to have been murdered. The book satirized detective novels, both in terms of their twisty plots and their potboiler writing style.

V. turns to Success, Knight's second book, which he says approaches even closer to Knight's great overall themes. The book concerns a man and a woman who meet in a car pool during a bussing strike. Sebastian details every element that led up to their meeting, outlining several moments in their past when they nearly met, any one of which would have set off their great romance. Once they do finally intertwine fates, of course, they live happily ever after. V. describes Success as Sebastian's most popular work and emphasizes, as he did with Bezel, that his summaries cannot do justice to the beauty, strangeness and elegance of Sebastian's writing. V. notes that one passage in Success is closely connected to Sebastian's "inner life": a rumination that suggests that human happiness may be impossible because death is inevitable.

Now approaching a critical juncture, V. expresses frustration that he is not doing Sebastian's work justice. However, certain that he has done his best, V. speculates that Sebastian is somehow helping him. He informs us that P.G. Sheldon, a poet who was friends with Clare and Sebastian between 1927 and 1930, was kind enough to help him in his researches and gave him much of the information contained in the pages to come. Sheldon told the narrator that when Success was indeed a success, Clare was very happy. She desired Sebastian to dwell a bit in his fame, to soak up the attention, but Sebastian could think of nothing but his next project. (Through Sheldon we also learn that soon after V. had seen her on the street, Clare had suffered a miscarriage and then died herself.)

V. tells us that following Success Sebastian began to have fits of temper and to take his frustrations out on Clare and his other friends. Wild happiness would give way in a flash to stubborn, moody mistreatment of Clare. Meanwhile he completed his three short stories, the last of which represented the end of the "research theme." Though he seemed to love Clare as much as ever, he also seemed to have left her behind, and she didn't know what to do about it. V. declines to imagine that sexual frustration played a role in their separation, stating that he personally thinks that sex is not so big a deal as many make it out to be; he supports his opinion with passages from Sebastian's work. Finally, V. suggests that the sombre mood of Sebastian's next and final book, The Doubtful Asphodel had settled into his life.

At a doctor's suggestion, Sebastian departed for Blauberg, in Alsace, to undergo a treatment for his heart condition. The afternoon he was to leave, he had tea with Clare, Miss Pratt, and Sheldon, after which Clare spontaneously decided to join him at Alsace; Sebastian told her to go home rather than accompany him. Sebastian was then incommunicado aside from a brief note until Clare telegrammed, prompting Sebastian to say he was returning early by way of Paris. In Paris, V. and Sebastian dined together. V. noted that Sebastian looked terrible. He asked Sebastian about Clare, and Sebastian replied that they were "sort of married"; he then went to make a phone call and, upon returning, announced that he had forgotten an appointment and needed to leave.

V. quotes a passage from Sebastian's writing -- stating that he doesn't understand how people can dine in restaurants without noticing their servers -- which he supplements with a memory: after they dined together in Paris, an old man offered them an advertisement, which they both ignored at first; Sebastian suddenly rushed back to the old man, took an advertisement, read it carefully and threw it out. He then drove off hurriedly. V. returns to Sheldon's memories, saying that Clare thought of Sebastian as mad during these times and admitted that Sebastian would not talk to her. When Sheldon approached Sebastian on the subject he was told to mind his own business.

Sheldon later learned from Clare that Sebastian had begun getting letters from a Russian woman who had stayed at the hotel in Blauberg. Six weeks later Sebastian left England and was gone for months. Clare moved and found work at a life insurance office. A few months later she and Miss Pratt began to meet again, but they did not discuss Sebastian. Five years later she married. In Lost Property, Sebastian's next-to-last novel, a chapter deals with an airplane crash. Some letters that have fallen out of the plane are later discovered, and one is a love letter that has somehow gotten into an envelope directed to a business firm. In it, a man says goodbye to a woman he loves, admits that it was because of another woman, and tries to tell her how he feels and why it happened. V. believes that at least some things said in this letter are expressions of things Sebastian feels for Clare, perhaps even things that he wrote to her. What he does not understand is how Sebastian could have taken such real, important feelings and build from them a "fictitious and faintly absurd character."

Having returned to London, Sebastian suffered a serious heart attack and took to his bed. He managed to finish Lost Property, but his business affairs went into disarray. The effort to find even a simple phone number began to be greater than writing a chapter; thus Mr. Goodman entered his life. Slowly Goodman acquired control over all of Sebastian's affairs, and according to Mr. Goodman, Sebastian shrunk into dejection. Mr. Goodman criticized Sebastian for refusing to accept the role of the author in the modern world, despite all of Mr. Goodman's pleas; when he did finally write about the world it was with such aloofness that he might have been writing about "a dead bee on a window sill." V. finds Mr. Goodman's words so ridiculous that comment is hardly necessary. But he cannot help remembering how Roy Carswell, who painted Sebastian in 1933, told him about how Sebastian used to make fun of Mr. Goodman, while sitting for his portrait. Carswell also told him that Sebastian finally fired Goodman for changing a phrase in a new edition of The Funny Mountain. Mr. Goodman refrained from mentioning the incident in his book.

Now the narrator thinks about Sebastian's portrait, which showed his face as a reflection in a pool of water, a water-spider on the surface seeming to cling to his cheek. Carswell admitted that he wanted to suggest the shadow of a woman behind him, but decided that it would be "story-telling instead of painting." V. told him that he absolutely needed to find the woman, but Carswell believed it impossible, promising him the picture if he ever did find her.

Analysis

The first half of this section consists entirely of V.'s analysis of and praise for Sebastian's first few works. As the narrator does a poor job of integrating this analysis into the text, one might wonder why he bothers. On the whole, the decision emphasizes a shift we have tracked in earlier parts of the novel: away from Sebastian Knight as a person and toward Sebastian Knight as a writer. Likewise, V.'s primary relationship to Sebastian becomes not that of a brother, but that of a reader -- or, to take things farther, that of a fellow man of letters. Sebastian lived through his fiction in a very powerful, real way. Thus, the "real" life of Sebastian Knight might well be his fiction. V. has no trouble drawing from Knight's writings as well as his biography -- though he displays a bizarre anxiety from time to time when the line between life and fiction threatens to collapse completely, as when Sebastian seems to have put his own words to Clare into the letter in Lost Property.

Which leads us to the million dollar question: Is Sebastian a good novelist? Certainly the ideas presented here are thought-provoking -- the pastiche of the detective genre, the minute exploration of intertwining fates, etc. But it is by no means clear that these ideas make for good novels. Indeed, V.'s shrill insistence that he cannot do justice to the beauty of Sebastian's work seems to protest too much -- is it really so hard to do justice to beauty when beauty exists? It's harder, perhaps, to call dull thought experiments beautiful, which seems to be what V. is in fact doing. The excerpts from Sebastian's novels are absurd, melodramatic, completely without drama. Introducing the character dynamic he would later perfect in Pale Fire, Nabokov gives us an overserious, too personal analysis of a mediocrity (Sebastian) by an obsessive (V.). We are borne along not by curiosity about a "great artist," but by our natural fascination with the workings of obsession.

Still, Sebastian's work does reflect upon the biographical elements in the story, especially when we turn to Success. That novel, at least as V. sketches it, gives us a kind of basic template for understanding any life: we experience a series of coincidences, opportunities, missed opportunities, that altogether form a sort of fate. Sebastian's meeting with Clare, for instance, like the meeting of the lovers in Success, opens up a comfortable, happy, lasting connection that might have been missed indefinitely had the two never coincidentally crossed paths. In this light, Sebastian's interest in coincidence, which recurs throughout the novel, informs his vision of life as a whole. Of course, Success' version of a finally fulfilled coincidence -- which leads to "happily ever after" -- is too pat and simple by far. As Sebastian's experience with Clare shows, there is no coincidence to end all coincidences, no "final" meeting wherein indefinite happiness is possible. A further twist of fate can undo a happy coincidence just as elegantly as it was begun.

This section invites a broader understanding of coincidence than simple meetings. Sebastian's health is a major plot point here -- and indeed his declining health seems inextricable from his declining relationship with Clare, his move toward sombre subject matter in his fiction, and his affair with the mysterious Russian woman. Again, life jostles with art -- the fact of dying gives way to the art of dying, the novel about death. Just as meetings between fated friends can instantly and deeply change their lives, so too the bad health seems to change Sebastian's whole approach to the world. Clare, with her emphasis on sunniness, happiness, success (she wishes him to wallow in his fame, to enjoy himself) is out of place as his health worsens. Sebastian's physical uneasiness leads him, then, to reject emotional ease. He throws himself into misery of all kinds -- fictive as well as "real."

As the above themes and plot strands play out, V. has become less and less obtrusive, more and more skillful as a narrator. He has us in the thrall of suspense. However, his concerns and interests still dictate much of the direction of the novel. For instance, V.'s exposure of Mr. Goodman still smacks of revenge, even though it is more skillfully couched here than it was before, when V. fussed aloud about libel suits. And V.'s apparent obsession with uncovering the identity of Sebastian's Russian lover certainly follows from V.'s personal stake in Sebastian's Russianness. As Sebastian's Russian brother, a partial representative of the home country that Sebastian seemed to reject in favor of jolly old England, V. is both fascinated with and eager to explore the Russian femme fatale, as we shall see at length in the chapters to come.

Summary

V. tells us that he decided to go to Blauberg on the trail of the Russian woman. He made the journey by train, alluding thus to Sebastian's train journey of years before, and arrived in Blauberg just as the hotel opened, before the season had fully begun. At the hotel, V. tried to cajole the manager into revealing the identity of Sebastian Knight's lady-friend, but the manager refused to release any such information. V., forced to change tactics, formulated a new plan for uncovering her identity while on a Strasbourg-bound train.

A man with a thick French accent, Mr. Silbermann, boarded V.'s compartment and began to chat unencouraged about his business: toys and sporting goods. Silbermann further revealed that he was once a private detective, which prompted V. to ask how he might trace the Russian woman. Silbermann agreed to discover the names and addresses of everyone who stayed at Sebastian's hotel during that time; they were to rendezvous in Strasbourg the following Friday. V. offered payment but was refused for the time being; moreover, Silbermann made V. a gift of his notebook, which he thought V. had been admiring.

That Friday Silbermann delivered a list of forty-two names and addresses, thirty-seven of which were not relevant. The four possibilities: Mademoiselle Lidya Bohemsky, of Paris; Madame de Rechnoy, also of Paris; Helene Grinstein, a pretty Jewish woman who lived in Berlin; and Helene von Graun, who, despite her German name, spoke Russian and also lived in Paris. His task accomplished, Silbermann tried to convince V. not to bother these women, to forget them as they had surely forgotten Sebastian, but V. declines. He paid Silbermann -- though Silbermann charged a paltry fee and reduced it further with tortured calculations -- who left before V. could even obtain his address to send him a copy of the completed biography.

V. began with the Berlin address. A boy admitted him to a strange, ugly house filled with unusual inhabitants and V. found Helene Grinstein after a good deal of wandering. She began to speak to him as a friend, assuming that V. had arrived for her brother-in-law's funeral. V. began to depart, but she kindly asked him how she could help him. Hesitantly, he asked her if she had known his brother, Sebastian Knight, at Blauberg, but she said they had never met and he instantly believed her. Upon learning his name, though, Helene revealed that she knew his father in Saint Petersburg. She remembered that some friends, the Rosanovs, were speaking of it just the other day, and invited V. to contact them before he took his leave. V. left, convinced that Helene was not a homewrecker, and determined to see the Rosanovs and incorporate their memories into his book as well.

At the Rosanovs, V. learned that Sebastian had been good friends with Rosanov, and that his sister, Natsha, had been Sebastian's first love. Natasha told V. everything she remembered of their time together -- days on a boat, star-gazing, etc. At the end of the summer, she ended the relationship, telling him she had fallen in love with someone else. Rosanov, unlike Natasha, declined to recall anything about Sebastian other than that he had not been popular at school.

V. tells us that he ran into difficulties upon returning to Paris, but declines to specify as he is keeping himself out of the narrative (so he says). He then looked up the three women in a current directory and found two right away -- one of whom was listed under a husband's name. The third, Lydya Bohemsky, was not listed in any directory, but V. decided to look for her at the address Silbermann provided. Determined to visit all three woman in one day, V. began with Madame de Rechnoy, the one listed under her husband's name.

Her husband, Phal Rechnoy, answered the door and boisterously showed the narrator into a modest room which also contained a young boy and an older man whom Pahl introduced as his cousin. The boy sketched as the men played chess. Waiting a moment as the men finished their game, the narrator hesitantly asked if his wife might possible have known some German friends of his. Rechnoy replied easily that she would be back soon and he could ask her himself. Eventually the cousin and the young boy left, allowing V. to question Rechnoy. In the course of this questioning, Rechnoy revealed that the woman in question may be his first wife rather than his current wife -- his first wife, Nina Toorovetz, had been a femme fatale of sorts who had been at Blauberg as their marriage ended. Rechnoy expressed doubt that V. or anyonce would be able to find her. As V. left the cousin and the young boy were climbing back up the stairs.

Analysis

Just like a Sebastian Knight novel, V.'s narrative seems to have taken on the trappings of genre fiction -- we are now in the midst of a mystery search for a femme fatale. Of course V. is no Sam Spade; his first and only plan, to ask the hotel manager, is ludicrously misconceived, and it's only with the (again, coincidental) help of a "real" private investigator that he gets the information he needs. Nabokov, rather than V., seems to be in full control of these events, cheekily giving us a "life imitates art" moment in which Sebastian's style of genre satire --complete with detective stories and gumshoes and vampy homewreckers -- materializes before V.'s unseeing eyes. Indeed, V. is personally driven to resolve this paradox, to play "Russian roulette," as it were, with the possible femmes fatale.

Or is it really this simple? Perhaps V. is indeed caught up in a plot seemingly authored by Sebastian -- complete with characters straight out of Sebastian's fiction, like Silbermann (whose name and mannerisms recall one of Sebastian's creations, Mr. Siller). Perhaps, on the other hand, V. is making the whole thing up. Just as he was tempted to give his imagination free range in his account of the Cambridge visit, so it seems possible that as he builds confidence as a fiction writer, V. feels that he can simply fabricate the rest of his "real" life of Sebastian. Perhaps, stymied by the hotel manager's non-compliance, V. embarks more or less consciously on a Sebastian-style plot, full of coincidences and absurd characters, in order to keep his story from stalling altogether. Nabokov seems to be enjoying himself very much, inviting us to shift allegiance between these two views of the unfolding tale -- the V.-is-blind view and the V.-is-making-it-all-up view. Perhaps the truth splits the difference -- perhaps V. is making some things up and is ignorant of other things. But then what is the truth, and why do we care to find it when it seems impossible to do so? Nabokov, if he is successful in anything, is successful in rendering problematic the presuppositions of truth-seeking.

It's worth looking more closely at the correspondence between Sebastian's fictional creations and the new characters that populate this section. V., quoting Sebastian, writes that "Mr. Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique --: the bushy eyebrows and the modest mustache. . . the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat." Meanwhile Mr. Silbermann is described as "a little man with bushy eyebrows," the removal of his "bowler hat disclosing a pink bald head. . .. He winked; his small moustache bristled." Just like Mr. Siller, Mr. Silbermann performs a service for the narrator whom he meets on a train. As if to underscore his selflessness (a defining characteristic of Mr. Siller), Mr. Silbermann winds up refusing any payment for his trouble, and departs before the narrator can do more than thank him.

V.'s first visit to Helene Grinstein winds up being a sort of red herring -- which no detective plot should be without. Almost the instant he meets her, he knows that she could not possibly be the woman in question. But, in another coincidence (recalling, for instance, the pile-up of coincidences in the boarding house in Bezel) she directs V. to Sebastian's first love, Natasha Rosanov. Natasha and her brother provide V. with a few more details of Sebastian's life, but at this point V. seems far less interested in biographical information than in his search for the Russian woman and in his obsession with Sebastian's fiction. He even writes, "A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of the book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic." Indeed, this is no longer a biography, with Sebastian's life the key to his works; it is something else, a quest of a different color, with Sebastian's works the key to -- not just his life, but V.'s, and perhaps to life in general.

V.'s next meeting continues to pile on the coincidences and literary reverberations. The story seems to be dividing all women into two camps -- the vamp camp and the good-girl camp. For instance, Pahl Rechnoy's description of his first wife, Nina, recalls earlier descriptions of Sebastian's mother. Meanwhile, one can see similarities between descriptions of Clare Bishop, Helene Grinstein and V.'s mother. V. says of Helene, "She never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life -- they build it." Just as V.'s mother, despite the loss of her husband, managed to get her own family out of Russia safely, Helene Grinstein soldiers on through her own grief, a young and lovely matriarch. Similarly, when Clare Bishop lost Sebastian, she did not fall apart. She moved beyond her grief, marrying another man and putting the past behind her. In contrast, Nina Rechnoy abandoned her husband and child when she had "sucked [him] dry" while Sebastian's mother left the moment she grew bored with the attentions of just one man.

Summary

Though at first Nina Toorovetz seemed to be the mysterious culprit, V. tells us that he decided that she was far too obvious and common to suit Sebastian's tastes. So V. continued on to the next house and asked to see Madame von Graun. She wasn't in, but he was granted an audience with her friend, Madame Lecerf. Having confirmed that Madame von Graun was Russian, V. chatted with Madame Lecerf, who suggested that Madame von Graun might indeed have been Sebastian's lover, adding that he could see Madame shortly. After learning a bit about Madame von Graun from Madame Lecerf, V. was all the surer that von Graun could be the femme fatale.

Just to be certain, V. sought Lidya Bohemsky as well. He finally tracked her down in a "gloomy looking house not far from the Santé prison." Mademoiselle Bohemsky herself answered the door: "a fat elderly woman with waved bright orange hair, purplish jowls and some dark fluff over her painted lips." V. immediately hurried away.

The next day he awaited Madame von Graun in a sitting room, noting that despite some provincial touches (carnations in a vase, a radio set), Madame von Graun seemed by her accoutrements to be a charming and cultured woman. Madame Lecerf entered with a small, black bulldog and apologetically explained that von Graun would not return for a week. V. asked her to tell him more about her friend, and Madame Lecerf stated that von Graun let out a knowing laugh when told Sebastian's name over the phone. Lecerf further related that she and von Graun had attended the same school in Paris; she continued with an account of von Graun's conquests. She had only ever loved one man, apparently, before marrying a fool and embarking on a series of affairs. Lecerf got V. to tell of how he found her address, laughing all the while at the folly of the Rechnoy's (which shames V., who thinks this ordeal has become too lurid for his taste) before continuing the story of von Graun. Apparently she decided to force an intellectual (whom we are to surmise was Sebastian) to make love to her. She found him insulting and bullying when he did fall for her; she grew bored with his pomposity and took another lover. The intellectual continued to come around, awkwardly jostling with the new lover, until von Graun had a hired boy scare him off.

Now certain that von Graun was the woman, V. arranged to meet her if only to see the sort of woman who could have ruined Sebastian. Madame Lecerf, after offering a mild defense of her friend, invited V. to visit she and von Graun at Lecerf's country house.

V. noted that there was a likeness between the descriptions of Madame von Graun and Nina Rechnoy and wondered whether they were friends at Blauberg. He then sent a letter to Helene von Graun, alluding to some "literary business" between them. A week or so later he boarded the train for Lecerf's and realized that he would pass the town where Sebastian was buried. He soon arrived at Madame Lecerf's house, which was large and somewhat dilapidated (though it was but thirty years old). As he entered he passed a man -- M. Lecerf -- who took his leave.

Madame Lecerf appeared, looking quite pretty, and hurried her visitor along to the train. V. inquired about von Graun's arrival, thus irritating Lecerf. She complained about her critical husband before they continued together to lunch, where they were joined by an old lady and a handsome blond gentleman. Madame Lecerf made no introductions, only aimlessly small-talking V. Finally, V. alluded to his letter to von Graun, the mention of which made Lecerf quite angry. She telephoned von Graun to no avail before changing the subject and leading V. outside for a walk. V. related his brother's death by heart failure, which Lecerf found surprising. While she asked why Sebastian was worth writing a book about -- she, and von Graun too, V. surmises, was obviously ignorant of his literary existence -- a car pulled up. Madame von Graun had arrived.

Though V. was eager to question her, von Graun and Lecerf colluded to avoid him for a few days. Von Graun apparently misunderstood his letter and found it insulting. Lecerf promised to win her friend over. They continued to talk and Lecerf let fall several interesting details. For instance she said, "Once upon a time. . . I kissed a man just because he could write his name upside down." Then she seemed to have a spider on her neck -- which V. remarked in Russian and which she understood, thus proving that Lecerf spoke Russian. These hints built up until finally V. realized that Lecerf had been discussing herself, not von Graun, the whole while. He tells her that he had met her former husband and the cousin who could write upside down. Thus V. left, finally aware that Lecerf had been Nina all the while, and that this was the woman his brother fell for. He determined to send her a copy of the book by way of explanation.

Chapter 18 begins with V. recalling that he had meant to ask Nina whether she had realized that Sebastian was one of the most important writers of his time; he decides that the question would have been worthless, for Sebastian would not have let such women in on his literary accomplishment.

V. then abruptly turns to the last few years of his life, during which Sebastian wrote The Doubtful Asphodel at the British Library and various other places. The premise of the book is that a man is dying. He is the focus of the novel, but unlike the other characters, the reader never gets a clear picture of him. He fades in and out of view. The reader follows many lives as they swell and recede in this man's mind. They learn of his regrets, his mistakes and his fears. The reader seems to experience the slow decay of his body and mind.

Then suddenly Asphodel changes, and it seems "we are on the brink of some absolute truth. . . the truth about death." Every minute it seems that this truth will be revealed, as the narrator digs deeper and deeper into the question of death. Just as it seems the word must be spoken, the narrator hesitates. Should he go this far, should he follow this man into death and reveal the truth? This moment of hesitation is too much. It is over and the man is dead, the truth still unrevealed. And yet one is left feeling that the truth is there, buried somewhere in one of the last passages, if only one reads carefully enough. V. remembers the day he learned of The Doubtful Asphodel. He read an announcement of its pending publication in the newspaper, and for a moment he envied his brother more than ever. He could not help but picture him standing in a room full of admirers, happy and confident in his success. V. decided to get the book as soon as it was published, though this was something he always did, and when he went to his business meeting, he asked his companion whether he had read any of Sebastian Knight's books. The man replied casually that he had read a few, but that he hand't liked them very much. He commented that Knight's books frustrated one without making one think. Following that comment, V. bungled the business meeting.

Though Asphodel received very good reviews, there were hints as to some confusion about the position of the author, some suggestions that he was growing old and tired. The narrator wondered what Sebastian thought. After failing to recover a copy he loaned to a friend, the narrator bought another and did not lend it out. It is his favorite of Sebastian's books.

Analysis

V. does not come out well in this section. It begins with his determination that Nina could not have attracted his brother -- which we learn by the by is false, Nina attracts Sebastian and V. both -- and follows through a series of mild humiliations until V. finally cracks the mystery and sees Nina's true identity. V.'s relationship with Nina, flirtatious and obscure, gives rise to far more questions than answers. His need to defend Sebastian's memory from Nina's clutches perhaps suggests that he sees Nina as an embodiment of the kind of woman who ruined her father -- he wishes to save Sebastian, even if only the memory of Sebastian, from similar ruin. Or perhaps he is simply struck by the injustice that Nina could have fallen for a man like Pahl Pahlich but not for a literary genius like Sebastian. Then of course there is the possibility that V. has staged the whole thing -- that he wished to control Nina's identity to suit his purposes, a license that, as a writer, he possesses. He certainly mirrors Sebastian's temptation and his own; both brothers succumb, to a greater or lesser degree, to Nina's tempting ways. Perhaps V. wishes to present this as further evidence of his similarity to Sebastian. All in all, Nabokov gives us a literary puzzle of sorts that opens up speculation about the inadequacy of such puzzles. The puzzle is even more puzzling, that is to say, when it is solved.

And to pile puzzle on top of puzzle: who really cares about this mystery, aside from V.? The whole mystery, which has been moving along at a good clip for several chapters now, adds up to nothing more than an exposure of V.'s own anxieties -- about his mother, about his relationship with Sebastian, about his national and linguistic heritage. It promised to "solve" the problem of Sebastian's existence (at least, V. behaved as though it held this promise; the careful reader has been wary of the "puzzle" from the start, suspecting its irrelevant nature all along) but it ends up inviting confusion.

It's fitting, by the way, that the "clue" to Nina's exposure is linguistic -- her use of Russian. Language throughout the book has been tied to identity, and Nina's denial of Russian works as a mask of sorts, relieving her of her Russianness (and thus deflecting V.'s suspicion). Yet, as V. puts it, "language is a live physical thing which cannot so easily be dismissed." Nina's Russian, like Sebastian's, is deeply seated in her life; it allows a peek into her real identity despite her desire to mask herself. Nabokov is perhaps suggesting, more generally, the degree to which our language determines our being. We are what we say, what we have said, who we have said things to and with. Attempts to deny the person that language has made us to be will thus probably fail.

Having solved the mystery, V. seems uncertain how to proceed. One is reminded of his earlier confession that he had taken a writing course to prepare for this project. While he had a purpose for his research and his writing, the narrator strode ahead, always confident of the next step. Now that his goal is once again murky, he retreats the security of the written word -- once again he talks about Sebastian's books. After the confidence and panache of the middle "mystery" chapters, V. is back in uncertain territory.

Sebastian's last book is about human death. V. is at his most eloquent in his summary of the book, as he if he has fully taken over his brother's persona. The reader might become entranced by V.'s rhythmic sentences, waiting as Sebastian's readers did for that one truth to be revealed. However, once again V. unconsciously undermines his credibility when he recalls learning of the impending publication of this book. He recalls that he imagined his brother standing in a room full of admirers, swept up in the happiness of his success. Though he notes that his brother was actually miserable and ill at the time, somehow he seems jealous of even this imagined moment of happiness. This slightly envious tone continues as the narrator explains that this is his favorite of all of Sebastian's books. Knowing what we now know about Sebastian's frame of mind about the contents of the book and while writing it, it is difficult to imagine how V., who claims to feel so much love for his brother, could read it without sharing his brother's misery.

Summary

V. tells us that he finished his research by reconstructing the last year of Sebastian's life - 1935. He muses on the strange resemblance between Sebastian Knight's name and the year of his death - 1936. When The Doubtful Asphodel was published in 1935, Sebastian made his last attempt to see Nina and was sent away by her young admirer. He returned to London and for several months attempted to get out in the world, but everywhere he appeared "a thin, mournful, and silent figure.' One day he ran into Miss Pratt and almost saw Clare, but resisted. He went to see a film, The Enchanted Garden, three times, and when V. saw it, he realized it might have been because there was a shot of sunbathers on the Riviera and Sebastian might have caught a glimpse of Nina. He became very ill, but he ignored the advice of his doctor, and then he disappeared for several months.

V. tells us that at this time, while was in Marseilles on business, he received a strange, rambling letter from Sebastian. Though Sebastian's allusions to his approaching death upset him, V. was quite used to his brother's pessimism, and knew nothing of Sebastian's serious heart condition. Still, he was touched by his brother's unusual desire to see him, and so he decided to go to Paris that Saturday.

That night V. had a strange, unpleasant dream. He was in a large barren room with his mother, a man from work, and the man's wife. They were waiting for Sebastian. His mother kept trying to dispose of dirty, unwieldy objects, such as a muddy bicycle. The couple disappeared. Sebastian appeared wearing a black glove on his hand, which the narrator realized was fake. Sebastian must have suffered some sort of injury. He began to feel ill. A manicurist entered, and as she bent over Sebastian, the black hand fell off, releasing a pile of tiny, soft little hands, like claws. Everyone vanished. Then he heard Sebastian's voice and realized he was buried under a pile of sacks filled with grain. Upon waking, V. sent a wire to Sebastian telling him he was coming, but then he made the mistake of stopping by the office where he was held up until late that night. He returned to find a telegram waiting from Dr. Starov, telling him to come at once.

V. went to the station and realized that he didn't have enough money for a second class ticket. He decided board the train anyway, only to notice that he'd forgotten Sebastian's address. V. desperately tried to think of the name of the town, the name of the hotel where Sebastian usually stayed, but he could remember nothing. He tried to reassure himself that he could call Dr. Starov, but he couldn't help but agonize over whether Sebastian would still be alive when he got there. He slept fitfully.

When he finally arrived in Paris, V. went to a phone booth and looked up the doctor. He dialed, but the phone only rang and rang. He finally got through to a woman who told him that the doctor would be back at 5:30. V. tried the doctor at his office and his home, to no avail. Staring at some grafitti, V. finally remembered that Sebastina was at St. Damier. He took a hellish two-hour taxi ride followed by another miserable train before finally arriving at Sr. Damier.

An old man let him in at the hospital and V. whispered that he was here to see his brother, spelling his name. The man grumbled for a few minutes, but then he told a nurse to take V. to number thirty-six. He bribed a nurse to be allowed to see his brother. As he waited, a feeling of love swept over him, and he couldn't wait to talk to his brother, to tell him all of his thoughts on his books, which he had read so carefully. He sat quietly for a while before speaking again to the nurse, who remarked that the patient's mother would arrive in the morning. V. then realized that they couldn't be talking about the same patient, as Sebastian's mother was dead. The nurse, thus corrected, said that the Russian gentleman had already died.

Though he did not see his brother alive, V. felt that he had learned something tremendous all the same. Any soul can belong to anyone, if you come to understand it. Thus, having labored so to understand Sebastian Knight, he was Sebastian Knight. V. pictured himself on a lit stage, a cast of characters circling around him. He saw Mr. Goodman, Clare and Nina. Slowly they disappeared, but he remained. Sebastian's mask clinging to his face, for he is Sebastian and Sebastian is he, or they "both are someone whom neither of [them] knows."

Analysis

As the narrator ruminates about the strange confluence between his brother's name and the year of his death, he is actually picking up on a pattern running throughout the story. The number thirty-six constantly reoccurs throughout Sebastian's life, just as violets are repeatedly associated with his mother. Sebastian lived at 36 Oak Park Gardens. He died in 1936, when he was thirty-six years old, in a hospital where he was patient number thirty-six. Nabokov uses such patterns and symbols in most of his works. There are a way to symbolize the paradoxical coincidences that form all our lives -- the chance meetings that change us forever. Nabokov, like Carroll and Borges and other writers who mix the fantastic and the realistic, doesn't merely discuss the ineffable patterns and puzzles of subjectivity: he performs them. He inhabits a fictional world that is at once full of order and meaning -- the violets, the numbers -- and yet still quite indeterminate and ambiguous.

As V. traces his brother's decline, Sebastian becomes a sadder and lonelier figure. When the narrator receives the letter from him, asking him to come to see him, he reacts with equanimity. At this point, one might stop to wonder, did Sebastian love his brother? If Sebastian was actually as cold as V. constantly implies -- and many critics have pointed this snag out -- why does he ask for his brother as death approaches? Why did he continue to write to a step-mother and much younger half-brother, when ties could easily have been cut-off? Why did he suggest that his brother move to London to live near him, or have dinner with him when in Paris? Nabokov invites us to consider that V., not Sebastian, was the source of coldness and tension in their relationship. He resisted his brother's love even as he desired it -- he envied his brother even as he idolized him.

V.'s dream is a strange jumble of Freudian imagery and desperate rambling. Given Nabokov's well-documented dislike for Freudian imagery and analysis, once again one might plausibly suggest that V. has begun to depart from the truth. Between his overdramatic description of the prophetic dream that convinced him to rush to his brother's side, and the ridiculous obstacles that met him on his path (a journey extremely reminiscent of an earlier description of the police detective's journey in The Prismatic Bezel), it seems extremely likely that V. has invented his traumatic journey to disguise the fact that he ignored his brother's letter, prioritized his work over the possibility of a real illness, and simply arrived too late to bring Sebastian any comfort.

At the end of the novel, V.'s mask seems to slip, at least momentarily. He seems completely unaffected by his pointless visit to Sebastian's bedside. After all, while he believed he was sitting by Sebastian, he felt totally at peace. This peace was not affected when he learned that Sebastian was already dead. He speaks strangely about suddenly feeling as if he has captured Sebastian's soul, and in one sense his words ring true. V. has learned the power of the writer: by writing Sebastian's life, he has taken possession of it. Despite his title, he doesn't care whether or not the Sebastian he has described has any "real" relation to the man. After all, he is dead, and those who write his life can almost claim to have lived it; no one has much authority to say otherwise. Once again V. makes reference to Mr. Goodman, "the flat-footed buffoon, with his dicky hanging out of his waistcoat," but this time the jibe falls flat. Whether he recognizes it or not, V. has become Mr. Goodman as well as Sebastian. He has used the life of a famous man to pry himself into prominence. That Sebastian was his brother does not excuse the act -- it renders it all the more treacherous. If anything excuses V., in the end, it is that his chanelling of Sebastian results in some smart, interesting prose -- and a rather disturbing glimpse at the jealous, sentimental huckster who is V.

• Biography of Vladimir Nabokov
• About The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
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• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 13-15
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 16-18
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 19-20
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