Nomina nuda tenemus: Postmodernist Method in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

Thesis Abstract Vladimir Nabokov is usually regarded as one of the most important authors of postmodernism. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the method which Nabokov employs in Pale Fire and which earns it classification among postmodern novels. His approach to the text causes Pale Fire to be emblematic of Lyotard's incredulity toward metanarratives, Barthes' reservations to authorial figures and Eco's reinvention of flatus vocis. Nabokov's dialogue with the form results in a subversion of the formal elements of the novel. Pale Fire introduces at least one unreliable internal author, Charles Kinbote, who undermines and defies his authority as an academic commentator, which vastly contributes to the destabilisation of the novel's form. This combines with an anti-rationalistic approach to inscriptions and names which do not simplify the access to the content that they indicate, but rather complicate it. Even the first obvious subject of Pale Fire, that is the subject of the academic commentary, a poem "Pale Fire", has an unstable form as it cannot be determined whether the version as presented is a final one. Therefore, neither the narrative voice, nor the terminology, nor the main subject contribute to the stability of the novel's form, on the contrary, they disintegrate it. Similarly unconventional is..