Well, here it is:
"I hurried past the rear truck, and had another glimpse of my old friend, in tense profile, wearing a cap with ear flaps and a storm coat; but next moment the light turned green, the little white dog leaning out yapped at Sobakevich, and everything surged forward—truck one, Pnin, truck two. From where I stood I watched them recede in the frame of the roadway, between the Moorish house and the Lombardy poplar. Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.
Cockerell, brown-robed and sandaled, let in the cocker and led me kitchenward, to a British breakfast of depressing kidney and fish.
'And now,' he said, 'I am going to tell you the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture.'" (7.7.4)
The first paragraph of the ending of Pnin is almost picturesque. Pnin is in his little sedan, driving off into the sunset in a soft golden mist where, as the narrator says, "there was simply no saying what miracle might happen." This is the perfect fairytale ending to Pnin's story. After reading that, we feel as if Pnin's life might be changing for the better, even though he just lost his job and is heading out of town.
But then there are the last two lines of the novel. There is Cockerell again, a dude who made a little bit too much fun of Pnin before. And now he starts to make fun of him again. Not only that, but Cockerell's joke brings the story full circle by referring to the very first moment that we meet Pnin in the novel. Convenient, ain't it?
But then it also does something very strange. Think about it: how in the world would Cockerell even know about that incident? Furthermore, he's not telling the story correctly. Pnin actually ended up delivering his lecture without a hitch, even though the narrator wanted him to bring the wrong one. Yet somehow in Cockerell's joke, the narrator's evil dream actually came true.
So instead of leaving Pnin's story with warm and fuzzy feelings, we are just once again reminded of how creepy VN is and how nothing can ever go right for our poor Russian émigré. Even the story of his messing something up gets messed up. Sigh…