Comment
Hermann is another example of Nabokov's use of the unreliable narrator. Throughout the novel, Hermann's perception is skewed and his word cannot be trusted—he admits as much in the beginning of the novel when he shares with the reader his love of spinning yarns. The reader can never be positive if Hermann is accurately narrating the events because he tends to conflate his own skills and talents while ignoring reality around him.
"Despair" is a story of false doubles, one of Nabokov's favorite themes. The very title of the novel announces this theme as French-speaking Nabokov chose a word (despair) which in French means 'some pairs', or simply 'pairs' (des paires). But is also means, so to speak, 'to undo a pair', to 'dis-pair', i.e. the process going on in the novel by which the pair Hermann thought did exist actually revealed itself false. In it, doubling seems to be only an obsession with physical resemblances. Almost all of Nabokov's fictions make ample use of doubling, duplication, and mirroring, mostly in Pale Fire and Lolita. "Despair" is a perfect introductory reading to the double topos in Nabokov's more complex novels, where other kinds of doubling (scenes, numbers, names, etc.) are brought into play.
Vladislav Khodasevich had pointed out that Nabokov is obsessed with a single theme: "the nature of the creative process and the solitary, freak-life role into which a man with such imagination is inevitably cast.." Hermann who sees himself as an artist composing the 'perfect murder' fits this description.
The book is rich in intertextual connections to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle. The most important crossreference is to Dostoevsky, and Hermann carries certain similarities to Raskolnikov who had also planned a perfect murder in Crime and Punishment; this link, however, is not seen as an hommage but rather as an iconoclastic parody of "Dusty" Dostoevsky.
Read more about this topic: Despair (novel)
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