Natasha

What we see in Nabokov's Natasha is an embodiment of the idea that narratives lie in the specific voices that tell them, and anything fundamentally true or false about them is revealed when the narrative is put into conversation with another voice. That is, a heteroglossic conflict. Also, it subverts the authority of the narrator by communicating stories which, from the perspective of the narrator, are composed of un-true facts. The story allows for multiple 'truths' within it by lending legitimacy, on a very basic level, to an idea of individual chronotropies. That is, as each character tells their story, the not only show their distinction from the narrator, but also demonstrate their particular expression of their experience in time and space is legitimized by the act of expression. That is, a story teller is naturally embodied within his or her story and manner of telling.

While the polyphony of the story is found, naturally, in the dialogic digressions and tales, it also exists in the narrative itself. When Natasha is seen crawling into bed, early in the story, she is described as 'sensing, like a bystander' her own physical form and its relationship to her world. In this moment, Nabokov is demonstrating that they only way for this voice, which is not Natasha's, to communicate the physical sensations that Natasha feels is to say how she would feel if a consciousness which does not possess her body were to describe her body's sensations. That is, the closest that the narratorial voice can get to Natasha, in any ideal sense, while remaining a voice distinct from hers, is by describing what she thinks someone else might think about what she feels. The nod of 'like a bystander' is that narrator's communication of Natasha's imitation of the narrative voice--it is showing that two voices cannot discuss the same action in the same way, because as soon as they engage in the process of mimesis, they enter into speculation.

And is this ever a story about speculation--Wolfe is a story-teller, and prefers to engage with his fanciful imagination than with the actual events of his life. So he relates stories that bear all of the functional resemblances to traditional adventures: foreign landscapes, unusual creatures, feats of bravery, and, above all, the sense of timelessness. It is this sense of the dissociation of time and place, Bakhtin's chronotope, which reigns supreme in Wolfe's stories. Not only because it seems impossible that Wolfe would have been able to accomplish all of these feats, but because these stories are being told. When a story is told, it exists in a place where it can be infinitely altered, edited, and re-told--while the words telling it have to be presented in order, the story itself does not, and, often, is not. The speaker reigns supreme over the story-world, and as such re-molds the time and space within that story in order to accomplish one essential goal: the effective communication of all pertinent information to the listener, in a decipherable. The satisfactions of speaking, in this light, are that of deciding what information is pertinent, and how decipherable the form is to be.

The reader eventually discovers that Wolfe is telling stories that factually bear no resemblance to his life. Before that moment of admission, Wolfe gives an almost more telling confession: 'Oh, Natasha, I sometimes felt like a god.' In the light of Wolfe not having physically participated in his related experience, this is a tricky line to decipher. This line refers to the general feeling that Wolfe was overcome with when in the spaces that he describes--as such, it cannot be as easily discounted as the facts of his stories. Wolfe is actually describing the feeling of what it is like to embody the story-space, wherein he is actually a god, a deity elevated to a status above that of any one man. In order to give the appearance of internal consistency, he puts 'felt' in the past to identify it with the dissociated story-time--Wolfe actually embodies the stories that he tells, and, as he an Natasha come to decide, it doesn't matter that his stories didn't happen. They are his stories, and he lives them each in the telling.

Nabokov's technique is notably distinct from Burroughs'--where Burroughs made language deliberately un-intelligible, and destroyed the act of reading to call the reader's attention to the falsifying nature of storytelling, Nabokov takes the supposition that people can never communicate perfectly in language and suggests that as language's greatest attribute. He is enamored with the ability to live in private conceptions of time and space, and applies that ability to every day life. He is not destroying language, but suggesting that its ability to expose its subjective nature, in presentation, is its greatest quality and a testament to its validity.