The Coral Island are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and "The Coral Island" is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison to "Robinson Crusoe" such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as "The Coral Island" and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel "Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific".
Despair (novel) wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann". To put it simply, 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. Additionally, Despair is also a tale 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 it also means, so to speak, 'to undo a pair', to 'dis-pair', i.e. the