Despite Nabokov's legendary diatribes against Dostoevskij, many of
Nabokov's novels seem to be self-conscious responses to Dostoevskij's
works.
Both these narrators compose confessions which alternate between candor and obfuscation, between pronouncements of their guilt and self-justifying declarations of innocence. Their opinions of their own character traits and behavior swing from one extreme to another, from arrogance to self-loathing and back again. Both novels reveal a pronounced tension between the professed frankness of the narrators and their tendency to manipulate the telling of events in their own favor.
Both Humbert and the underground man are unreliable narrators, and their unreliability takes on precisely the same quality. They faithfully record the basic events of their respective stories; we have no reason to doubt the facts they describe. Rather than deceiving themselves about factual information (for instance, Humbert does not delude himself into imagining that Lolita is really older than twelve), they deceive themselves about the moral implications of their actions. This tension between the characters' awareness and their self-deception complicates and enhances the two novels.
Nabokov and Dostoevskij both choose a first-person narrator; the
underground man and Humbert seem to demand the narration of their own
stories in order to exercise that complete control over the other
characters on the page that they failed to achieve in life. In both
cases, they experience feelings of triumph and success from their
ability to manipulate Liza and Lolita into accepting the roles these
narrators have assigned them. The underground man tries to impose his
interpretation of her role on Liza: he sees her as merely a prostitute
whom he alternately humiliates and imagines redeeming. Similarly,
Humbert imposes on Lolita the role of nymphet
and
reincarnation of Annabel. Yet both female characters escape this
confinement: Lolita runs away with Quilty and Liza leaves the
underground man's apartment without accepting the money he offers
simply to degrade her. Having been outwitted by these young women,
Humbert and the underground man each turn to the one thing that
remains in his control: his story.
Perhaps the most significant revision
of anti-writer.
Though profoundly influenced by literature
and harboring a certain hope of producing a work of enduring
literature, the underground man nonetheless claims to reject all that
literature stands for. This is demonstrated in his rejection of a
conventional plot structure or narrative voice, and in his
intentionally clumsy diction and syntax. He can no more resolve his
conflicts as a writer than he can any other internal conflict; indeed,
his writing is a vivid representation of these inner conflicts. In
contrast, Humbert's prose can be eloquent, lyrical, and resonant; the
structure of his composition is exquisitely symmetrical. Though his
writing is uneven, the process of creation itself paradoxically allows
him to immortalize Lolita in a work of art and simultaneously
recognize that she herself was not an artistic creation but a human
child. While the underground man can only write in circles, Humbert
resolves his own internal conflicts through genuine art.