Oneself as Character: Emplotment, Memory and Metaphor in Ricoeur, Bakhtin and Nabokov’s "The Gift"

Ch. 6. P. 129–151.

Bilmes L.

Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical novel The Gift is formally expressive of an implicit – and not always acknowledged – metaphoricity inherent in narrative form. This chapter will investigate the special way that Nabokov’s novel, through its switching between third and first person modes of narration, enacts a vicarious grasp of the conception of narrative identity, offered by both Ricoeur and Bakhtin, that entails a plotted articulation of sameness to otherness, oneself as though another. Nabokov’s novel shows us the past self coming into life through the animating detour of metaphorical self-identification, when it is represented “as if” an independent character story-shaped by the narrating self. And it thus shows how it is that we can better see ourselves in and through the lens of literature.

Keywords: повествование, нарративизация, метафора памяти, Поль Рикёр, Paul Ricoeur, Mikhail Bakhtin, Михаил Бахтин, Владимир Набоков, autobiographical novel, автобиографический роман, личная память, Vladimir Nabokov, personal memory, memory and metaphor, narrativization

In book

Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection

L.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.