In Brief — Owning Your Own in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘A Guide to Berlin’

A Guide to Berlin is deceptive, rather than truly being an attractions map for tourists, the reader plays the part of a pawn in another of Nabokov’s literary schemes. The part taken is that of the aspiring writer, struggling to convey imagery in their work. The narrator/the guide serves as a blueprint for how to inject imagination into the most mundane niches of ordinary life.

The narrator fixates on the ordinary, projecting their own narrative over these everyday mundanities as a means to communicate some underlying sense of linearity or cohesion where there otherwise is not. Nabokov utilizes these devices as tricks, setting an example that coerces the reader’s own investment in this “narrative”. This fixation ultimately serves to critique the ideologies of both a narrator and aspiring writers.

While sitting at the bar beside their friend, the narrator describes how future societies will reflect on their time from now. How tomorrow’s museums will attempt to romanticize and depict the normalcy of life as it is today which otherwise goes unseen. The narrator obsesses over these minute details in a manner that comes across as omniscience however, in doing so the narrator embodies the exact type of romanticization they’ve brought to focus. Perhaps what the narrator and by extension Nabokov seem to suggest in this instance per advice for the writers is that to depict imagery requires a writer to be a historian of their own time. If your life will be displayed, it’s best to display that life correctly rather than having a third party paint that picture of you against your will.

For example, the last page of the story sees the narrator observe a young boy who, as the narrator describes, “has long since grown used to this scene… He will remember the billiard table…and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap,” revealing crucial introspections of an unknown bystander to the reader that the narrator otherwise has no access to except for being a surrogate for the author. Dually projecting their own ideas and observations onto the identity of this nameless boy.

What this may be is an example of paralepsis. A term used to describe what was usually the mistake of early authors where their narrators were knowledgeable of details without access. For example, two people having a conversation where one character is capable of reading the others’ thoughts with no notion of them having the ability to do so. As happens between the narrator and the boy here.

Functionally, what this achieves is to allow Nabokov to use A Guide to Berlin as a tool for writers not just on how to establish imagery but maintain the integrity of a text. By outing his own narrator as omniscient, Nabokov points to a fatal flaw many writers face in having information be relayed or unraveled in nondiegetic ways. This observation is reinforced by the narrator’s friend intersecting the narrator’s train of thought, creating a sense of a meta-narrative where Nabokov is aware of his reader’s questions, squandering them as they arrive.

Have a look below at the following set of lines from the story.

“I can’t understand what you see down there.”

“What indeed!” How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?

These lines reinforce the narrator’s philosophy of the relationship between museums and being the writers of our own past.