Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First-Person (Peripheral Narrator):
Um…How about first-person omniscient? A character in the story who knows (or says he knows) everything going with everyone else? Okay, don't put that down for a test. We're not responsible for what might happen if you do. Even when it's about Nabokov.
The narration is the great mystery of Pnin. At first the novel might just seem like a comedic character study of an aging Russian émigré, but then things get twisted. In the beginning, the narrator is unobtrusive. You might be tempted to think that it was written in the third person omniscient, since the narrator seems to be able to listen to all of Pnin's innermost thoughts.
But then the narrator starts talking directly to us. And then he starts talking about himself, and even his own relationship to Pnin. That's when things get really weird.
First of all, who is this guy? All we know about him is he is Pnin's "friend" and a Russian lecturer. And we're not even so sure about the details of that. What does he want with Pnin? Are they really friends or does the narrator just keep insisting that? Why is he telling us Pnin's story? Unfortunately, we don't have answers to any of these questions.
The one thing that we do know is that the narrator is almost certainly a liar. Remember how we said it seemed that we had a third person omniscient narrator? That's because the narrative new things that a first-person narrator could not possibly know. For example, how could he know anything about Pnin's childhood? Or his hallucinations of his parents? Or even his love for Mira Belochkin? Those are things that only Pnin or his very close friend would know. And the narrator is neither of these.
Actually, Pnin tells us that the narrator is a liar several times. He says: "I tried not only to remind Pnin of former meetings, but also to amuse him and other people around us with the unusual lucidity and strength of my memory. However, he denied everything. He said he vaguely recalled my grandaunt but had never met me. He said that his marks in algebra had always been poor and that, anyway, his father never displayed him to patients; he said that in Zabava (Liebelei) he had only acted the part of Christine's father. He repeated that we had never seen each other before" (7.3.2).
And then again: "Now, don't believe a word he says, Georgiy Aramovich. He makes up everything. He once invented that we were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations. He is a dreadful inventor (on uzhasniy vidumshchik)" (7.4.2). Let alone not knowing what "cribbing" at an exam is, that raises some red flags. In our option, that makes the narrator pretty durn sketchy.
Now, why would Nabokov decide to give us this creepy and potentially evil narrator? Well, we can't be sure, but we could make a wager that Vladimir Nabokov (interesting initials) is using VN (what a coincidence!) to make a comment on the role of the author. After all, authors are completely making up characters, changing their life history, and putting them in terrible situations all for our own entertainment. In other words, writing a book gives them permission to play God. That's pretty creepy, wouldn't you say?