Neither “Signs and Symbols,” nor “The Vane Sisters,” nor Zashchita Luzhina are narrated unreliably in the sense that we expect. This mode of unreliability is outlined helpfully by Booth as faithfulness to both the “fictional truth” of a work—that which truly “happened,” fictively—and the norms of the implied author. In homodiegetic narration, this usually must involve distortion of the “fictional truth” to suit some narratorial rhetorical end (Booth 158-159). But none of the three primary narrative voices in these texts appear to be lying. Instead, it is through the subtle structuring of the narrating instance (with attention paid to style, focalization, and reader cognition) that Nabokov compromises the authority of his narrators to relate what they observe. This produces an ambiguity that—despite distancing us even further from any sense of social understanding or emotional involvement in the work—cleverly aligns us to Nabokov’s authorial stance, precisely through our frustrated efforts at decryption.

Concisely: each of these pieces contains a sort of diegetic bait- and-switch. In Zashchita Luzhina the narrator appears to claim an objectivity and omniscience. He authoritatively reports on internal states, and focalizes the story through different characters who do not have direct access to each other (as when he describes Valentinov disappearing after giving the aging prodigy “some money, the way one does to a mistress one has grown tired of” (Nabokov 91)). But as Luzhin’s mental health seems to deteriorate, the narrator’s objectivity goes with it. Narration becomes marked with the same motifs over which Luzhin obsesses, and the character’s intrusive thoughts and fixations begin to take up more and more of the actual volume of the text (Toker 69-70). This leaves the reader on uneven ground, as when—during Luzhin’s first significant psychic breakdown—he relates the vivid images of his obsessive visualizing, only to emerge from it rapidly with few syntactic markers of a return to “reality.” The “deception” here properly relies on the reader’s assumption that the narrator is “above” the diegesis, only for an all-the-more-surprising revelation of the opposite. The narrative voice of the text is keenly influenced by the events of the story—Luzhin’s childhood traumas, important memories, and desires (when they exist) all figure prominently in the narrator’s treatment of detail. One thinks of his embarrassment over returning to school when his photograph appears on a magazine cover, and keen attention is paid to the specific rhythm of the blowing wind when he runs away during a snow storm (Naiman). It is unclear precisely whether this narration is influencing Luzhin’s cognition, or the other way around. A similar case exists in both “The Vane Sisters” and “Signs and Symbols”: the former sees the narrator relating what he believes to be an impartial account of the Vane sisters’ family tragedy, only for his voice to be subjugated to the diegetic material he tries to arrange (in, most especially, the
famous concluding acrostic),  while the narrative frame of the latter makes it all but impossible for the reader to consume the narration without finding such trifling details as family history, photo albums, and the quality of sounds foreboding (Nabokov 70).
 

This “unreliability,” then, stems less from discernment of ill-intent on the part of the narrator, and more on the creation of an almost extra-extra-diegetic authorial presence. It is easy enough for the authorial voice to intrude in other ways: through coincidences and self-aware invocation and subversion of type, as when Luzhin meets Valentinov again by chance, or when narrator of “The Vane Sisters” feels impelled to dismiss the lingering presence of the dead just so his disbelief can be mocked (Nabokov 170-171). However, it is a decidedly Nabokovian touch to construct a narrating instance in which the author nonverbally alerts the reader to his disconnection from the narrative voice, and in so doing demonstrates one further—deeper—level of control over the discourse (Wood 66-67). This might well be understood as an advancement of Phelan helpfully describes as “bonding unreliability”—by which the author better attunes the reader to the rhetorical aim of the text through the irony of the narration’s incompatibility with fictional truth. In Phelan’s model, by reaching out to the reader “behind the narrator’s back,” an author renders the ethical norms of the text more easily understood and more easily used to judge the plot action (Phelan). But with no outright “lie” for uncovering, the reader is instead pointed toward the ambiguities inherent to fictional truth, itself. When in “Signs and Symbols” one sees “under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird [...] helplessly twitching in a puddle,” it is precisely the cloying and typical use of this image that draws one’s attention to their own cognition while reading, and their own “referential mania” (Wood 56). Parsing unreliability in these three texts is not a matter of detecting contradictions sprinkled through someone’s account; rather, the lack of contradiction and excessive stylistic and structural unity of the discourse draws attention to the fact that there is no fictional truth for us to deal with—only the instabilities inherent to the subjective interpretation of detail.
 

Corollarily, the significance that characters and readers ascribe to information may not be the same. Herein lies the second crucial “deception” at play in Nabokov’s otherwise less deceitful narration: in each of these texts, typical sources of signification are undermined. The same bleeding-through of plot-pattern into narrative voice also works the other way around, as Nabokov seeks to engender the mistrust of information that is otherwise plainly diegetic. One thinks of details like the narrator’s avoidance of the whiskey at Cynthia’s last soirée (claiming his status as a Frenchman makes him “prefer the grape to the grain”), or Luzhin’s almost surreal small talk with his future mother-in-law (“Atmosphere! Quite a word, eh?”) (Nabokov 7, Naiman 193, and Toker 69). Because of ambiguities like this, we are simply unable to arrive at a stable sense of meaning, and cannot perform the sort of literary mind-reading that affords us any of the social pleasure (or understanding) we normally experience from narrative discourse. In fact, without the ability to make authoritative attribution ourselves—and without a reliable and authoritative voice to attribute internal state for us—through obvious artifice Nabokov nullifies the social and psychological stakes ofall three of these works. The human questions at play in “The Vane Sisters,” for instance, can vanish altogether. Our interpretation of the extent to which the narrator sincerely cares about the sisters’ death cannot move past the fact that he is literally “haunted” by them both: the world of the narrative is reduced to a joke. Likewise for Luzhin: those sections of the narrative that place the narrator closest to the actual diegesis and merge Aleksandr Ivanovich’s cognition with the narrative voice of the text—his increasingly common loss of time and space while thinking about chess, and his breakdown in his game with Turati—do the most to portray him as a passive object of the unfolding patterns around him, defining him by the narrative framework whose lattice over his life he only perceives (though vaguely) with great anxiety (Naiman 192). One does not read Luzhin as intelligent, or attribute any active inner life to him in spite of his apparent genius at calculation and combination. What knowledge the reader is afforded about his internal state reduces him as well as it can to object-status.
 

Thus, the unfaithfulness of the narrative voice to the very idea of “fictional truth” in these three texts functions, to some extent, reduces them to detail (or perhaps more discourteously, “scenery”). Through it, the internal struggles of characters are muted and Nabokov makes a far more dramatic gesture than he otherwise might toward a pervasive sense of malicious cosmic arbitrariness which results in chess grandmasters suffering despite their childlike innocence and sad biographies, young women dying and an intellectually effete academic disregarding their resonance, and (probably most savagely)
an impoverished émigré family needing to care for a mentally ill son who is critically correct that the very fabric of their world is out to get him (Naiman 193). This presents a paradox. Nabokov artificially intrudes on his narrators so that they efface themselves organically into the diegesis, which in turn highlights the author’s artificial presence in the narrative, and only in so doing can he adopt the artificially sadistic posture of a fate that he wants to show as organically apathetic. The reader in turn deals with an unstable discourse: it does not matter if the events happen the way they are described because their very description prevents meaningful psychological engagement with the people they
happen to.

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Fortunately the way out lies in this treatment of—and reduction to—detail. Changes in description—a sudden absence of punctuation, a burst of figurative language or sonic consonance, or an appearance of similar images in sequence—are what signify the narrative voice’s shifting distance from the characters. By privileging style this way, Nabokov ensures that sensual information in these texts comes at a hermeneutic premium. Certainly, the color and size of the jam jars in “Signs and Symbols” is sufficiently negligible, specific, and empirical enough of a narratorial observation that it does not especially need to be questioned. So, too, for the description of the icicles in “The Vane Sisters,” regardless of who put them there. It is only details like these—plot-inconsequential, and thus existing in the fictional world before they were wrapped up into any character’s cognition—that one can “trust.”

We might well read this as a riff on the Chekhovian fashion to include arbitrary detail which exists independently of the story action—a move which does characterize, but not in a way necessary to satisfy considerations of verisimilitude and character autonomy. This

use of detail, as Chudakov famously illustrates,15 elegantly but subversively side-steps earlier realist need for the sensory information to directly illustrate character and tone (Chudakov 559-560). But while Chekhov often uses incidental detail to ground his characters firmly within their material circumstances, if not to speak to their personalities, Nabokov’s pointed inclusion of “randomness” speaks to its own worthlessness. Gift-basket jam jars get description—and appellation by “clumsy, moist lips”—when all the reader cares about is whether the phone will ring again, in an instance that is explicitly and archly disdainful of its own frustrating effect (Nabokov). Zashchita Luzhina sees a bounty of sensory description devoted specifically to the various odds and ends that find their way into Luzhin’s life during his recovery, all meant to keep him (and us) from the only subject of narrative consequence. If nothing else, then, Nabokov still allows the reader to find their footing—and their inlet into the ethical norms of the text—through the least privileged information in the narrative. This is perfectly reflexive, relying on the response that these incidental details naturally produce (the temptation of decryption, and the frustration when they resist) to attune the reader to what drama remains solely in the material unfolding of the plot. In perhaps one final “deception,” these details, though deliberately insignificant, are structurally vital. From them flows, ultimately, the crucial psychic communion between author and reader elsewhere so meticulously undermined and toyed with by the self-contradicting posture of these narrative voices.
 

Thus, the peculiar unreliability at play in “Signs and Symbols,” “The Vane Sisters,” and Zashchita Luzhina—involving precise awareness and manipulation of reader expectation and cognition—represents more the arousal of suspicion than it does rhetorical avoidance of the “truth.” In these stories, plot and character seem almost incidental: they do not fundamentally affect the discourse beyond providing the lexicon of details that Nabokov might use. But it is precisely by essentially nullifying the efficacy of his characters and compromising the integrity of his fictional realities that he manages to evoke so effectively a reader’s anxiety over (and, certainly, suspicion of) the arbitrariness of “fate.” In a sense, the ideal reader always reacts “incorrectly,” but nevertheless exactly how they are desired to.