White Nights

The unnamed narrator of “White Nights” serves as both protagonist and storyteller. A self-described dreamer, he is a deeply introspective figure whose inner life overshadows his engagement with the world around him. At 26, he lives in near-total isolation in St. Petersburg, Russia, without friends, family, or meaningful work. His relationship with the city is one of imagined familiarity; he projects emotional connection onto strangers and even personifies buildings, creating the illusion of intimacy in an otherwise disconnected life. The narrator’s namelessness further emphasizes his dislocation from social identity and individual recognition. He is not presented as a man with a defined place in society but rather as a psychological archetype—a man suspended between reality and reverie. 

As a narrator, he is unreliable not because he consciously lies but because his perspective is shaped by fantasy, longing, and idealization. His confessional tone invites the reader into his emotional world, but his perceptions are often filtered through an intensely Romantic lens. For example, his monologues are often delivered in long, uninterrupted streams of thought, mirroring the unstructured flow of his inner life. He alternates between narrating events as they happen and reflecting on them in hindsight, suggesting both immediacy and retrospective distance.