Nabokov's Pnin When One Mentions Essay

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What is interesting is that Wind appears to believe that he is acting in an ethical manner by informing Pnin of their plot, rather than surprising him with it when they reach America. Wind also seems to think that he is being generous and ethical by offering to pay for half of Liza's ticket to America, though why he would only offer to repay Pnin for half of the passage is an ethical question no reader could answer. He intends to take Pnin's entire wife when they reach America, and she is pregnant with Wind's child. Why offer to pay any part of Liza's passage, if Wind is not willing to pay her entire passage.

Liza's interactions with Pnin continue to be bizarre and unethical. She cheats on her husband Eric with a lover named George. Eric is aware of the affair and is willing to forgive the affair, but Liza feels that Eric has never been able to bond with their child. Therefore, she asks Pnin to set aside money for the child and send it to him. She does this with every expectation that he will comply, though the child was never his, he has no relationship with the child, and he has no obligation to the child. However, Pnin reveals himself as a very good person, clearly aware that this child will not find stability in Liza or Wind. He does send the boy money and involves himself in the child's life. The pair has a sweet but tenuous relationship, fraught with difficulty, but clearly one of the areas of Pnin's life that offers him some succor from life.

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That relationship reminds the reader that sometimes the greatest gifts in life come from exceeding one's ethical and moral obligations.

Though the novel describes a series of slights and cruelties directed at Pnin, it is actually Pnin who manages to triumph over the narrator. As described above, the narrator thinks that it is unethical for a story to have a happy ending, when the circumstances of the story suggest otherwise. Towards the end of the novel, Pnin has a ruined marriage, a strained relationship with his son, and has just been informed that he is going to lose his job. There is no way to anticipate a happy ending for Pnin. However, the novel actually has a very happy ending. Pnin manages to actually escape from the novel and evade whatever unhappy ending the narrator has in store for him. The end of the novel literally has the narrator pursuing Pnin, but unable to capture him. Fans of Nabokov's work realize that Pnin may have escaped into a happy ending; he turns up in Pale Fire, another of Nabokov's novels, working at a better college and presumably happy......

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