Vladimir Nabokov manipulates the ambiguous properties of language in Despair and the Real Life of Sebastian Knight. By playing with the sounds and meanings of words, he creates an atmosphere of double layers that resonates with the thematic nuances of the novel. Nabokov also peppers the two novels with what appears to be superfluous data and obscure allusions, and then cohesively ties that information to an important plot point. Despair and Sebastian Knight should be read as puzzles to be decoded; as Nabokov himself admits, "The dream of the attractively shaped Wiener schnitzel which the passionate Freudian may believe he can distinguish in the remoteness of my waste will prove, upon closer examination, to be a derisive mirage organized by my agents" (xii) . Nabokov obfuscates his clues with language and allusions so the reader, the sleuth, is forever thrown on and off the trail. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe evidence that later incriminates Despair's protagonist, Herrman, a cane, is presented to the reader as a curious verbal tic of his wife. "She is poorly educated and careless. We discovered one day that for her the term 'mystical' was somehow vaguely connected with 'fog', 'error' and 'stick', but that she had no idea what it really was. a mystic." (23). Subtext and foreshadowing abound in this seemingly innocuous phrase, revealed long before any murderous intent had been confessed. First, Herrman has somewhat "mystical" powers; has powers of bodily displacement: "The next phase came when I realized that the greater the interval between my two selves the more ecstatic I was; therefore I sat every night a few inches further from the bed, and soon the hind legs of my chair reaches the threshold of the open door. Eventually I found myself sitting in the living room while making love in the bedroom" (28). More important to Herrman is that a “missed stick” later becomes his fatal “mistake.” As the exiled Herrman rereads the scene before the murder, his narrator interjects: "With his staff, reader, with his staff. STICK, gentle reader. A crudely carved staff marked with the owner's name: Felix Wohlfahrt of Zwickau" .. With his cane he pointed, gentle or humble reader, with his cane!... the thought that my entire masterpiece, which I had conceived and worked out with such care, was now intrinsically destroyed, had transformed into a bit. mould, because of the mistake I had made" (203). Nabokov repeats the quasi-portmanteau "mistake" here to connect his wife's linguistic quirk to his mistake. Finally, the stick alludes to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. . Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which Jekyll is implicated in the murder of a respected gentleman. The weapon that Hyde, the murderer, uses is a stick once given to Jekyll (or the quartet of qualities) of the word reveals much about Herrman's character: his superior attitude towards his wife; his desire for a detached body which manifests itself in literary allusion and in the exchange of identities with Felix the “Happy”; and fittingly leads to the title of his book on examining his mistake: “‘Despair’; there is no need to look for a better title" (204). To complete Despair, the "mystical" motif is taken up in Sebastian Knight through another combination, "optimistic" (175). As the novel ends on a somewhat high and spiritual, the “optimistic” and “mystical” segments shine through. In Sebastian Knight, Nabokov further pushes the limits of wordplayhalf-brother, "The Prismatic Frame," a parodic Roman policeman, as Nabokov's narrators might say, who often turn to French to complicate and duplicate things, the astute reader notices a name change: "One of the Tenants, a certain G. Abeson, art dealer, is found murdered in his room... in the meantime the inhabitants of the boarding house are examined plus a passer-by, the old Nosebag, who was in the hall when the crime was discovered... A little by little one discovers that all the tenants are connected in various ways... 'I think,' said old Nosebag quietly, 'I can explain it.' Slowly and very carefully he removes the beard, the gray wig, the dark glasses and the face of G. Abeson is revealed" (90-2). “The Prismatic Bezel” is itself a title that serves parody; its prism absorbs the spectrum of art, then the bezel cuts and refracts the light with its many pointed edges Although Knight's novel is a parody of many crime novels, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None come to mind. Both are novels that allow the reader to think of themselves as always on top of things only to reverse course at the last moment. Sebastian Knight is equally parodic, teasing the reader with sometimes "obvious" clues, only to have them explode in their faces G. Abeson, a man whose life is to acquire art, never produce it, like V., is "Nosebag" at opposite (also "backward words", another Nabokovian pun). The name Sebastian is written with a "v" instead of a "" in the native Russian language. B.' Perhaps V. continued nosebagging throughout the book, but Nabokov, unlike Knight, leaves his conclusion in doubt: "So? I'm Sebastian Knight. I feel like I'm impersonating him on a lighted stage. . Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the resemblance will not be erased. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is me, or maybe we are both someone neither of us knows" (203). Although Nabokov sums up his story on a rather sentimental, even moral note, the earlier doubling of "G. Abeson" leaves some room for ambiguity in the final pages. To cloud things even more, Nabokov inserts several random numbers throughout Sebastian Knight. The first is Knight's date of birth, "the thirty-first of December, 1899," or, in other words, the dawn of the new century. The woman who told V. this information is called "Olga Olegovna Orlova? an egg-shaped alliteration that it would be a shame to hide" (3). they also coincide with the historical birth of Sebastian. The number "36" occurs often in the text: "In Mr. Goodman's Tragedy of Sebastian Knight (which appeared in 1936 and to which I will have occasion to refer more fully)" (4); So I was not at all sure that I would find her still alive, in 1936" (19); "In her last published book, The Doubting Asphodel (1936)" (23); "The time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936: it was always year 1" (63); "In March 1936, after a month's stay in England, I consulted a tourist office and left for Blauberg" (119); "I obtained a list of about forty-two names among which Sebastiano's (S. Knight, 36 Oak Parks Gdns., London SW) seemed strangely adorable and lost" (129); "In mid-January 1936 I received a letter from Sebastian" (183); "ah, here it is: Jasmin 61 -93" (194) [reversed and read from right dash to left dash, 61-93 is 19-36]; "'No,' he growled, 'the English Monsieur is not dead...K, n, K, g...n...I'm not an idiot, you know. Number thirty-six" (199). Thirty-six is ​​a perfect square of six, which contributes to the theme of doubling. It is also a number that can be reversed to reveal another number, as evidenced by the "61-93" reversal. V. connects these dates with an occult theory: "He died right at the beginning of 1936, and as I look at this.