Squirrels

Did you notice that squirrels are mentioned 11 times in Pnin? Every single chapter has a moment where Pnin encounters a squirrel. Isn't that just nutty? (We apologize for that terrible joke. We just couldn't help it.)

What is up with those squirrels?

Well, let's start at the beginning. Here is the very first moment that the squirrels appear: "Near his bed was a four-section screen of polished wood, with pyrographic designs representing a bridle path felted with fallen leaves, a lily pond, an old man hunched up on a bench, and a squirrel holding a reddish object in its front paws. Timosha, a methodical child, had often wondered what that object could be (a nut? a pine cone?), and now that he had nothing else to do, he set himself to solve this dreary riddle, but the fever that hummed in his head drowned every effort in pain and panic" (1.2.41).

So what is happening? Little-kid Pnin is sick with a fever and confined to his bed. He's so sick that he's basically hallucinatory, and what catches his eye is a squirrel on the screen in front of his bed.

So Pnin is in a moment of tragedy when a squirrel appears. It just so happens that every other time we see a squirrel, something terrible has either just happened or is about to happen to Pnin. A squirrel appears right before he slips on ice and falls. Another one appears right after Liza forces him to give money to Victor, and it's just as bossy as she was.

It seems safe to say that for whatever reason, Nabokov has decided to have a squirrel as the harbinger of Pnin's doom. So be careful next time you shout "Squirrel!"