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A review by jelundberg
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov
4.0
An interesting examination of identity. At times, I wondered at the relevance of some of the events in the story, and especially of the narrator's obsession with Smurov, before the climax informed me that they were one and the same man (I'd thankfully forgotten the back cover blurb that gives everything away).
I can't help wondering how differently the story might have read if Nabokov hadn't dropped the "narrator" a third of the way in, and treated the story more as a third-person POV, if he'd given us Smurov for the entire thing. But then again, he's dealing with identity, and disassociation after Smurov's suicide attempt, an act I still find difficult to understand. Okay, yes, the man he'd been cuckolding beat the shit out of him, but why would that drive him to want to kill himself? Was the embarrassment really so severe?
And so I get that after he recovers, and keeps telling himself that he's in the afterlife and that everything around him is a phantom of his former life, some kind of connecting bridge to move him from life into the great unknown, and he can justify becoming the "eye" that observes but doesn't participate. Everything that follows makes a sort of sense, but I'm still nagged by the attempted suicide. Maybe I'm hoping for sense within the mindset of a nonsensical narrator, but it just seems too much like a convenient plot device of Nabokov's so as to set the rest of the events in motion.
Anyway, once it is revealed at the end that the narrator is, in fact, Smurov, the text does feel more satisfying. The psychological journey he's taken in order to examine his identity seems to come full circle, although he's keen to point out that even the Smurov who tried to kill himself is not the real Smurov. And so I'm left at the end with all the different versions of the man, yet no objectively "real" version, which is quite an astute observation. We all wear masks depending on the situations we're in or the people we're around; is there really a "real" me? Nabokov seems to think not, and I'd tend to agree with him.
I can't help wondering how differently the story might have read if Nabokov hadn't dropped the "narrator" a third of the way in, and treated the story more as a third-person POV, if he'd given us Smurov for the entire thing. But then again, he's dealing with identity, and disassociation after Smurov's suicide attempt, an act I still find difficult to understand. Okay, yes, the man he'd been cuckolding beat the shit out of him, but why would that drive him to want to kill himself? Was the embarrassment really so severe?
And so I get that after he recovers, and keeps telling himself that he's in the afterlife and that everything around him is a phantom of his former life, some kind of connecting bridge to move him from life into the great unknown, and he can justify becoming the "eye" that observes but doesn't participate. Everything that follows makes a sort of sense, but I'm still nagged by the attempted suicide. Maybe I'm hoping for sense within the mindset of a nonsensical narrator, but it just seems too much like a convenient plot device of Nabokov's so as to set the rest of the events in motion.
Anyway, once it is revealed at the end that the narrator is, in fact, Smurov, the text does feel more satisfying. The psychological journey he's taken in order to examine his identity seems to come full circle, although he's keen to point out that even the Smurov who tried to kill himself is not the real Smurov. And so I'm left at the end with all the different versions of the man, yet no objectively "real" version, which is quite an astute observation. We all wear masks depending on the situations we're in or the people we're around; is there really a "real" me? Nabokov seems to think not, and I'd tend to agree with him.