Literary criticism has weighed in on both sides of this debate, some even claiming that Vadim is both a parody and a double (or Doppelgänger) of Nabokov. For example, Nabokov’sLolita is acted out by the narrator of Look at the Harlequins! through his fondling of the nymphet Dolly VonBorg. The attribution of a string of wives to the narrator must be understood in the context of Nabokov's life: After the publication of Lolita the wider public and many critics thought that its author must be some "sexual daredevil". With the serial polygamy related in Look At The Harlequins!, Nabokov can be seen to be poking fun at these perceptions. V.V.'s final wife is simply addressed as "You", which parallels Nabokov’s addressing his wife, Véra, simply as "you" in his autobiography Speak, Memory. The fact that V.V.'s final love is a spitting image of her predecessor "Bel" must be understood in the light of Humbert Humbert, the main character of Lolita, searching a nymphet just like his first love "Annabel", his first love when he himself was aged 12.

If V.V. is afflicted by feelings of being the double of another Nabokovian persona, this is because he bears in fact significant resemblances to the main character of the novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight from 1941.

Herbert Grabes is among the critics who believe that Vadim is Nabokov’s “parodic double”^{[citation needed]} (151). Pekka Tammi agrees: “any fictive [narrator] can be, even at best, only a ‘parody’ of the artist who is responsible for the ultimate fiction”^{[citation needed]} (289). Lucy Maddox calls Look at the Harlequins! “an oblique, satiric self-portrait”^{[citation needed]}(144). In Speak, Memory, Nabokov had written that much of his own life had appeared in his fictional works in the past, and that he felt as though he had lost these memories as they were crystallized into text, abstracted into fictions. His thoughts on the inevitably autobiographical nature of fiction seem to manifest, playfully, here.^{[citation needed]}