VLVL2 and NPPF: Missed Communication

[Tim Strzechowski]

> If missed communication can be taken as Zoyd's disconnectedness with the
> world around him, then Kinbote becomes an easy parallel.  My sense of
> chapter one of VL (and I haven't read it in over a decade, so this one
> chapter I read yesterday feels fairly new to me), is of a sort of Rip van
> Winkle waking up to a world that has changed while he slept, but not
> realizing it right away (not getting the message).
>
> Similarly, one approach to PF is to view Kinbote (as the alias of Russian
> scholar V. Botkin) as one who feels dispossessed by his homeland, left in
> the past as it were by the new Soviet system to which he doesn't find any
> connection, and Zembla is the homeland he creates to replace it.  Neither
> character is living in the world as it is in the present.
>

Excellent comparison between the two characters.  Curiously, it's made all
the more compelling because one work is told in 3rd person and the other in
1st person, no?  I wonder how the narrative voice impacts the ways in which
we, as readers, perceive the missed communications?