Vladimir Nabokov uses a narrative framework similar, but upgraded, to that which Conrad developed with such success. It is an omniscient framework within a framework, like a boxed set of novels that make up a franchise, only on a smaller scale. It is a technique that opens Lolita with blaring trumpets, in the incident report which summarizes the death of all the parties involved. (You might be surprised to know that I do not own a copy of the novel extant, but for me this is not a must have addition to my personal library, not under the duress of my present circumstances. I'm hostile to it as a masterpiece for reasons I shall not tackle here.) It is also present, but in softer fashion, in the earlier title, The Luzhin Defense. I have not seen the film, nor am I ready to view it, though some brief capsule skims convey the disappointment of reviewers; nor am I going to discuss the novel in great detail, except to say that one of its major motifs seems to be that if humans do not search for transcendence in religion, or even divinity, we still search for it through mastery of patterns and formal structures, which is a dystopian subtext when we take up androids, cyborgs, and robots in science fiction, the crux of the matter coming down to a dichotomy between personhood and a set of programmed responses, like kimmy using her piglet self to lie down on the keyboard when cynical adoptive parent is on a roll. I wonder if she'll inadvertently reformat the HP for me. Sulking, she is snuggled with Vinnie on the Quantum, so adorable we should all just die and cede the field to felines, and this too cute moment makes me regret that I cannot join marshmallow heads and upload another 7 billion cat pictures online, and tongue ties me when I say "She's not Joey!" Joey was special in that marshmallow overweening sentiment so very and extraordinarily difficult to define. He feared all ambulatory humans except those in wheelchairs, and suspect my aunt rushed him and his surviving sibling to me because something happened that instilled fear that left its imprint, at least on the deceased. Spielberg uses the same framework technique in A.I., almost, suggesting that in the end all we can hope for is that testament will survive, but this is an obdurate, romantic review of machine (and man) over the brutal realism of evolution before our eyes. What transforms particles into Being is beyond the scope of our own CPU's to understand, and I am highly skeptical that a mechanical device will ever evolve in the Darwinian sense, although I am less skeptical, and almost alarmed, that through mimicking microbiological processes, we will create artificial life. It scares me, as even cloning sheep and cows seems to create vulnerable immune systems as a residual effect of losing sexual division.
In mulling my quite exasperated conscience, I do not really want to explore the dark side of attendant care too much in this account, and Tim is better than much of the trash I've dealt with, past tense, but the system, designed toward de-institutionalization, is still a highly charged source of class conflict. Tim is basically a good man, and if I could walk, he would not exist for me, unless I was a paternalistic globe trotter like Niall Ferguson or Nicholas Kristof. Do those of you who can balance on the balls of your feet ever think about it? I have no organic sense of what it feels like. I accept it as a fact, our bipedalism, but I can feel my lungs expanding; I'm intimate with what it is to breathe. Walking was ever and only an approximation, and an exercise in pain, as indeed, is much of what mobility I do have.
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