In his book "The story begins" (
1996), Amós Oz studies the opening paragraphs of several novels
or short-stories, detailing what he calls an agreement
which is established between the author and the reader, plus the
various kinds of fake contracts and unrealiable narrators. When he chose Gogol's
The Nose I often felt Kinbote lurking behind his
comments as,for example, when he wrote about "anarchic forces ready to
ambush the story".
His only reference to Nabokov appeared when he
analyzed S.Yizhar's
Mikdamot
description about the birth of his conscious life. And yet Oz didn't
include "Ada, or Ardor", where we read about Van's piece
of stucco that fell over his crib and his considerations about the real
date of his birth.
A. Oz mentions synaesthesia, but he refers
only to VN's "Speak Memory" and then,
very rapidly, to illustrate the pressure over memory made by
narrative.