The Quest for a Mask: Metabiographical Life Writing in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most gifted novelists and auto/biography writers bridging modernism and postmodernism periods. His first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, is so profoundly influenced by and suffused with life writing as to be read as a metabiographical fiction foregrounding the baring of its device and its pervasive self-consciousness, which aligns with many of the author’s “strong opinions” as to autobiography, biography, fiction, and reality. This essay adopts “the quest for a mask” as a metaphor for biographical research, examining the metabiographical techniques employed in this novel and their significance in terms of biographical methodology and ontology. Firstly, it enlarges upon V.’s quests to reconstruct the “real life” of Sebastian Knight, respectively through the biographer’s memory, the biographical source materials, and interviews with some of Sebastian’s acquaintances. Secondly, it continues to analyze the elusive nature of the real subject and concludes that the “real life” is but a mask, behind which might hide Sebastian, V., and the authorial consciousness on varied planes. This essay concludes that Nabokov’s novel challenges traditional methodological orthodoxies and ontological certainties, thereby ushering in postmodern metabiographical fictional experimentation.