Novel: Despair

Overview

Despair is narrated by a self-assured, artful émigré who becomes obsessed with the idea that he has found his double. Set among expatriate life in Europe during the interwar years, the book unfolds as a first-person confession that is at once a crime plot and a psychological study. Its tone shifts between sardonic comedy and cold, clinical calculation, producing a sustained meditation on identity, perception and the hazards of self-deception.
The narrator presents himself as a man of taste and subtle intelligence who sees the world as material for his own aesthetic mastery. That confidence drives him to conceive a bold, theatrical crime: he will fake his death by murdering a supposed lookalike and thus engineer a clean disappearance. Nabokov uses that conceit to expose how fragile and distorted the narrator's self-image truly is.

Plot

The protagonist lives comfortably with his wife but feels cut off from purpose. Chance encounter with a disreputable stranger awakens in him the conviction that he has discovered someone who is physically identical to him. Interpreting this resemblance as an opportunity, he devises an elaborate insurance fraud: he will kill the man, stage a death scene, assume a new identity and move abroad with the proceeds. The plot is planned with almost artistic precision, treated by the narrator as an exercise in virtuosity rather than moral collapse.
As the scheme is enacted, every step becomes a testament to the narrator's arrogance and blindness. He frames the killing in terms of symmetry and artistic necessity, convinced that the world will submit to his design. Yet his readings of other people's perceptions and the degree of likeness are repeatedly undermined by small, telling failures of observation. The murder itself and the aftermath reveal that the narrator's certainties were largely inventions, and the neat picture he had composed unravels in ways he refuses to see.

Style and Themes

The novel's voice is an essential part of its impact: Nabokov crafts an unreliable, witty, self-justifying narrator whose verbal flair masks moral vacancy. Wordplay, ironic detachment and a playfully literary sensibility run through the confession, making the reader complicit in the narrator's misreadings even as those misreadings are being revealed. Nabokov delights in exposing the contrast between the narrator's linguistic sophistication and his moral and perceptual shallowness.
Central themes include the nature of identity, the danger of mistaking likeness for sameness, and the limits of self-knowledge. The book interrogates whether a person can ever fully grasp another or even himself, and it treats the crime plot as a laboratory for philosophical questions about doubling, performance and authenticity. Dark humor and a precise, almost surgical prose style lend the book its distinctive balance of comedy and menace.

Legacy

Despair stands out within Nabokov's oeuvre for its tight focus on a single mind's failure and for its demonstration of how language and narrative can both seduce and deceive. It remains a provocative exploration of how artists and aesthetes can confuse aesthetic control with moral rectitude, and how the desire to impose form on life can lead to catastrophic blind spots. The novel continues to provoke debate about the ethics of narrative voice and the pleasures and perils of identifying too closely with one's own illusions.