The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a tragic comedy. Or comic tragedy? It’s also a satire that mocks the glorification of writers.
The premise of The The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a tragic comedy. Or comic tragedy? It’s also a satire that mocks the glorification of writers.
The premise of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is that of a biography (kind of) of an author—Sebastian Knight—being written by his half brother. The story is told by the half brother as he attempts to investigate his brother’s life. The authors half-brother is a hapless idiot. Rather dumb and with terrible luck. Not only that, but he seems to idolize his brother who not only never gave a shit about him and who seemed to be overall a self-absorbed asshole. The story being told by the writer’s dull-witted, clumsy brother is mostly about his stumbling efforts to piece together what his half brother was really like. We get very little understanding of Sebastian, mostly a view of how cringingly pitiable the narrator is instead.
Very close to the beginning of the story, the narrator enraged me by burning Sebastian’s letters. Sebastian asked him to burn them…and he thought about reading them instead but did burn them. Up in smoke goes the narrator's first chance to have any insight into the secret inner life of his brother. In fact, many of the letters were love letters and more than half the novel is about the narrator trying to figure out who Sebastian’s lover was. WHICH HE WOULD HAVE KNOWN IMMEDIATELY IF HE HAD READ THE LETTERS. The entire stumbling journey and mystery was utterly unnecessary out of some embarrassingly foolish desire to follow his dead brother’s wishes. Like...I'm going to investigate this mystery and begin by burning all my clues. The entire story is filled with questionable decisions by the narrator, which lead to very little understanding of anything on his part. It’s both hilarious to watch his dumb mistakes and deeply sad to see him pursuing the empty meaningless shadow of his scornful arrogant brother. Is Nabokov saying, ignore the author just read the damn books?
The narrator spends quite a bit of time too trying to tease out meaning from Sebastian’s books. In other words, literary criticism of imaginary texts. The books sound rather inventive and at the same time ridiculous too. Like an author who tried too hard out of insecurity. It’s never quite clear if we should believe that Sebastian was actually a worthwhile, skilled author or merely achieved some literary buzz for a few books that will not age well and will disappear once a little time has passed. This narrators “story� of Sebastian’s life won’t do much to cement his place his history, in fact, if anything, they will make him more of a laughingstock merely through the reflections of (in?) his half-brother. As a biography, it’s more of an anti-biography. The narrator specifically notes that he tried to “leave himself out of it� and only indirectly touch on his own life, but the story is almost entirely about his own sad quest, and he’s too oblivious to see it.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight crucifies the idea of hero worship. And idolizing writers (or artists). The “Real Life� of Sebastian Knight leaves little to admire about the fellow.
Despite the obvious surface humor and satire of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, there are many intriguing layers to it, such as a theme that addresses the impossibility of understand a “real self.� It’s an onion with layers that can't be peeled. Or, better to say, they can be peeled and peeled and peeled and you end up with nothing left. This narrator isn't even good at peeling. Dare I say...he was rather unapeeling? This book was a metaphysical detective story that ends up with nothing to show for it. The idea of a self is pure fiction. And representing that through the life of a fiction writer is an excellent metaphor. I found the narrator incredibly frustrating at times, in his obtuse choices and embarrassing hero-worship, but at the same time, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was a rewarding and intriguing narrative.
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