納博科夫習慣於文本內安排各種引言、典故，利用文字手法，讓閱讀變成一種字謎遊戲，此一創作方法使他獲得「遊戲者」的稱號。綜觀而言，作家的「遊戲詩學」包含四個特點：矛盾性、不可靠敘事、互文性、文本多元主義。在小說《絕望》中，說謊成性的敘事者書寫自己如何殺死「同貌人」以詐取高額保險金。由於他所思、所言、所寫的情境，經常不符合現實，可謂典型的「不可靠敘事者」。當作家在文本中設計一個不可靠的敘事者，通常是為了以有趣的手法揭露藝術表現與真實之間的斷裂，讓讀者看見人類如何扭曲或掩飾事實。然而，納博科夫並非只追求事實的呈現，而在展現一種新的閱讀方式。本文即以《絕望》為研究對象，首先從理論角度闡述敘事模式，並將其套用在小說敘事結構分析之中；其次討論「不可靠敘事」背後的作家策略，以探究納博科夫如何將作品從人物的「騙術」變為作家的「藝術」。

V. Nabokov was accustomed to arrange a variety of quotations and allusions
within texts. He turned the reading into a riddle by text tactics, and the creation technique earned him the title of “Homo ludens”. In overview, there are four characteristics in writer’s “poetics of the game”: ambivalence, unreliable narration, intertextuality, and textual pluralism.
In Despair, lying narrator wrote about how he killed “the person with the same looks” for fraudulent claims to high insurance. Since what he thought, talked and wrote often did not correspond to the reality, the narrator was typical “unreliable narrator”. In text writer designed the unreliable narrator to reveal the gap between the artistic expression and the truth, allowing readers to discover how do people distort or disguise the facts. However, Nabokov tried not only to pursue the presentation of the facts, but also to demonstrate a new way of reading. In this article, the author first elaborates the narrative pattern from the theoretical point of view, and applies it to the structure analysis of narrative. Secondly, it discusses the writer’s strategy behind the “unreliable narration" in order to explore how did Nabokov turn the literary works from character’s “deceit” to writer’s “art”.