How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He found himself in a damp, green, purplish park, of the formal and funereal type, with the stress laid on somber rhododendrons, glossy laurels, sprayed shade trees and closely clipped lawns; and hardly had he turned into an alley of chestnut and oak, which the bus driver had curtly told him led back to the railway station, than that eerie feeling, that tingle of unreality overpowered him completely. Was it something he had eaten? That pickle with the ham? Was it a mysterious disease that none of his doctors had yet detected? My friend wondered, and I wonder, too. (1.2.23)
This is the very first time that we get to witness Pnin's heart condition. The narrator seems to be treating it as some kind of mundane event. He says, "Was it something he had eaten?" Just using such an overused phrase like that sort of trivializes the severity of Pnin's problem. Why do you think the narrator talking about it in this way?
Quote #2
I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced was something very like that divestment, that communion. (1.2.23)
Well, this is new. We more often see people saying that becoming one with the world is enlightenment. Instead, the narrator says that it is death. It's interesting that he specifically uses the word "communion," which is pretty close to the word "communism." That probably has more than a little to do with the fact that Russia's revolution was a communist one, so communism could be considered the cause of death for Pnin's childhood home.
Quote #3
And suddenly Pnin (was he dying?) found himself sliding back into his own childhood. This sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that is said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals, especially in the former Russian Navy—a phenomenon of suffocation that a veteran psycho-analyst, whose name escapes me, has explained as being the subconsciously evoked shock of one's baptism which causes an explosion of intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last. It all happened in a flash but there is no way of rendering it in less than so many consecutive words. (1.2.24)
Why do you think death is synonymous with going back to Pnin's childhood? Many people say that their lives flash before their eyes, but Pnin's memories seem confined to his time in Russia. What is the connection between Russia and death?