"Despair" is the second Nabokov novel to feature unreliable narration from a first-person point of view, the first being "The Eye" with the character Smurov. However, "The Eye" was more of an experiment condensed in a hundred-page novella, whereas "Despair" takes the unreliable first-person narrator to its fully fledged form, rivaling Humbert Humbert from "Lolita", and Hermann is in a sense Humbert's Russian cousin. Nabokov comments on this in the Foreword to the later edition of Despair, where he remarks that "Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to 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.