NPPF Comm 2: Parents: some notes

[jbor]

on 2/9/03 2:06 PM, Don Corathers at gumbo at fuse.net wrote:

>> Your thesis doesn't really seem to fit with the other mentions of Botkin
>> which Kinbote makes in the commentary;
> 
> Not sure what you mean by this. Botkin turns up again in the Commentary on p
> 267, in the context of an extended conversation about Kinbote's resemblance
> to the king of Zembla and his true identity.

See also the note to line 172 (not noted in the Glossary), where Kinbote
self-consciously makes parenthetic mention of "Prof. Botkin, who taught in
another department". Your thesis was that it is Nabokov "rising close to the
surface" of the narrative to drop the name "Botkin", as a hint to the reader
that Botkin = Kinbote. It's actually a little more complex than that. As I
pointed out, this and the subsequent references to "Botkin" are made
self-consciously by Kinbote, and he seems to be (as directed by Nabokov, of
course) deliberately nurturing the Botkin-Kinbote ambiguities.

best