How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
A young yawn distended his staunchly smiling mouth. With sympathy, with approval, with heartache Pnin looked at Liza yawning after one of those long happy parties at the Arbenins' or the Polyanskis' in Paris, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago. "No more reading today," said Pnin." (4.8.33)
Here Pnin is looking at Victor on the evening he comes to visit Waindell. It makes sense that Pnin sees Liza in Victor's features. He is her son after all. Do you think Victor's resemblance to Liza affects the way that Pnin treats him?
Quote #5
Finally, as they walked along a meadow path, brushing against the goldenrod, toward the wood where a rocky river ran, they spoke of their healths: Chateau, who looked so jaunty, with one hand in the pocket of his white flannel trousers and his lustring coat rather rakishly opened on a flannel waistcoat, cheerfully said that in the near future he would have to undergo an exploratory operation of the abdomen, and Pnin said, laughing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed "a shadow behind the heart." "Good title for a bad novel," remarked Chateau. (5.4.3)
This is so stereotypical that we are glad Nabokov makes fun of himself with the last line of this quote. Of course Pnin's metaphorical heartache has a literal manifestation. Couldn't he have thought of something more original? But at least he recognizes it's pretty cliché. Or is it—what do you think is the cause of Pnin's heart shadow?
Quote #6
Timofey Pnin was again the clumsy, shy, obstinate, eighteen-year-old boy, waiting in the dark for Mira—and despite the fact that logical thought put electric bulbs into the kerosene lamps and reshuffled the people, turning them into aging émigrés and securely, hopelessly, forever wire-netting the lighted porch, my poor Pnin, with hallucinatory sharpness, imagined Mira slipping out of there into the garden and coming toward him among tall tobacco flowers whose dull white mingled in the dark with that of her frock. This feeling coincided somehow with the sense of diffusion and dilation within his chest. Gently he laid his mallet aside and, to dissipate the anguish, started walking away from the house, through the silent pine grove. (5.5.14)
In this scene, Pnin is having a seizure at Cook's Castle and imagining that his ex-fiancée Mira has not been killed by the Nazis. Several times, it seems that the narrator attempts to portray Pnin's relationship with Mira as nothing more than a youthful fling, but we're not so sure. We'll just point out that the memory of Liza never causes Pnin to basically have a heart attack like he does here.