What am I missing? I just finished this for the first time and

>>8874356
>probably because of the constant hopping around
I hope you didn't read the poem, referring the notes at the same time.

>>8874356
Pnin and Lolita are Nabokov at his most emotional and visceral, whereas stuff like Pale Fire and Symbols and Signs are him at his most detached and formal. There's really nothing more to 'get,' if you don't enjoy what you've already gleaned from it then it's not your novel.

Ada, imo, is the mixture of these two elements and is his best work as a result.

I think it's really supposed to be taken as a playful novel. It doesn't look like you missed any of the major themes/ideas, and a lot of 'getting' this book is making sense of the different voices and plot lines to figure out what's actually going on.

I personally didn't enjoy it much either to be honest. There are some very comic moments and there's a devilish cleverness to its metatextuality, but I didn't get all that much human texture out of it to be honest.

>>8874453
No, but I did refer back to the poem when reading the commentary to get an idea of what contextually Kinbote was talking about, but it didn't really end up mattering because he was rambling mad most of the time anyway.

It was literally just higher-brow pomo fun. Not supposed to be taken as any grand statement or heart-wrenching work of art, just a cool concept novel about the nature of art and interpretation

>>8874356
As others have said, it's supposed to be fun. I treated it as a puzzle and mystery to be solved which made reading it a gripping experience.