SOURCE: “Singularity and the Double's Pale Ghost: From Despair to Pale Fire,” in Nabokov and the Novel, Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 97-118.

In the following essay, Pifer argues that characters who appear to be doubles of each other in Nabokov's fictions actually are not.

Despite Nabokov's consistent emphasis on the individual nature of reality and his obvious hostility to the notion of duality, his novels have given rise to innumerable speculations concerning the Doppelgänger motif.¹ To mention only a partial list of the many suggested doubles in Nabokov's fiction, there are Hermann and Felix in Despair, Albinus and Rex in Laughter in the Dark, Cincinnatus and Pierre in Invitation to a Beheading, Humbert and Quilty in Lolita, Kinbote and Shade in Pale Fire, as well as Van and Ada in Ada. Evidently exasperated by his critics' preoccupation with the double, Nabokov once dismissed the whole subject as...