Obscurity Undone, An Analysis of Fame

The poem "Fame", by Vladimir Nabokov, seems to begin with the description or rather a search for the description of a character to be placed in one form of literary sat, whether poem or prose. The character's physical description is already formulated in the narrator's mind, "waxlike, lean-loined, with red nostrils soot-stuffed", but the narrator is struggling with the placement of the character, whether human, important, or "nothing special--just garrulous dust." The narrator continues with the description of the character while still unable to decide his standing. Deciding that the narrator is without fame in line 20, the narrator decides that only those of meek hearts can listen to his character's words. One can assume then that those of proud hearts choose not to adhere to this speaker because he holds no fame therefore to them, no words.

In wearing "illustrations of various substantial arguments" in the form of "a panama hat, a cap, a helmet a fez", comparative to "headgear in the sense of externalized thoughts, the created character's speech confuses the narrator himself, the creator This confusion is suggestively due to, the narrator's, intuitively Nabokov, lack of full understanding of the language in which the author is using; a lack of being aground in one language or culture, "I kept changing countries like counterfeit money."

The character's speech or diction is far from Nabokov's native language yet not fully the adulterer but a strange fusion of the two, understandable to none other than the speaker. Such lack of understanding thus leading to the forgotten writer, who, "hopelessly fading into exile", strives on with wasted pages of prose. No one will attempt to understand the rogue émigré writer who is only partially Russian now. In a poetic work, the one being read now, the writer, who is suggestively one and the same with the created character, will contemplate such matters as being forgotten and yet that too, the poem, will also be forgotten and read by no one.

Nabokov seems to be, as the narrator said before, contemplating the ideas of fame, of fame in his own country and yet when transferred from one literary country to another, only a translation, at times, or a fragment of your work is esteemed as it once was.

One can assume that the narrator then arises from his poem and comes back to it at a later period bearing knowledge that would have completely erased the first half of the poem if prior possessed.