A son's love for mother.
Above all else, the story speaks of Vladimir's love and reverence for his mother. He loves her dearly. Like him, she sees the world through synesthesia, and like him, she prizes reading, art, and sensitivity. His love for his mother is depicted with artful poise and absolute reverence.
The reckless aesthetician.
There's no doubt about Nabokov's aesthetic genius; his novels Pale Fire and Lolita are two of the most beautiful novels ever constructed in any language. Few serious critics disagree. So this story has a service element that Nabokov owes to the public: He must explain what it was like to develop such an impressive command of beauty, language, life, and the human spirit. The answer is depicted through Vladimir's young life, his strange sense of beauty (also, synesthesia), and his imaginative genius (also, actual hallucination). These things, combined with his melancholic, indulgent personality are what apparently gave us such novels as Lolita.
The helpless romantic.
Part of Nabokov's story involves his absolute willingness to serve a lover. He wants to be indulged in the company of women, even from an early age. The prose suggests something of a maternal complex. Perhaps his god-like attachment paved the way for his experience of an Oedipal relationship to the universe, something that might make him a "Romantic," at heart, even if that means being something of a melancholic, detached person in his 30's and 40's.
The mature man and father.
Nabokov traces his life right until the point where his life stopped becoming about himself alone and started becoming about life with his wife and their young boy. As the final person in his progression, he has become alert of the beauty of life, and he cherishes the young boy's divine imagination with the same reverence he treats his own mind with, choosing to withhold himself from imposing his imagination onto the boy's. He does this when he declines to point out "points of interest" to the young boy.
