The Story Archive

Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov · 1957 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Timofey Pnin, a Russian teaching a language almost nobody at Waindell College wants to learn, boards the wrong train to deliver a lecture and mislays his luggage, his lodgings and his dignity in roughly that order. His ex-wife visits only when she needs something and his colleagues find him funny. The narrator reporting all this keeps intruding with a familiarity Pnin himself would not welcome.

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Attributes

Genre
TragicomedyPsychologicalSatire
Theme
Exile & HomecomingIsolation & AlienationMemory & TimeSuffering & Endurance
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanWise FoolWanderer
Plot structure
EpisodicUnreliable Narrator
Symbol / motif
The HouseThe TrainThe Feast
Conflict
vs Societyvs Self
Mode / tone
ComicIronicElegiac
Culture / tradition
Modern / American

Closest analogues