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Jaclyn Carey November 19, 2007
English Period 9 Dr. D’Angelo
LOA 1 Writing Assessment
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita” is quite perverse, yet interestingly and beautifully blunt about a major taboo. Nabokov is intriguingly explicit, though his language is far more prudish than the story it tells. The author eloquently intensifies the uncomfortable topics of pedophilia and molestation of pre-pubescent girls in an erudite narrative that almost belittles the atrocities the protagonist commits. But does the pedantic exquisiteness behind his story of Humbert Humbert’s horrific sexual obsession of with 12 year old Dolores Hayes soften the degree of atrocity of the main focus of the book? The use of charmingly vivid imagery and aesthetically detailed descriptions in “Lolita” can in fact make the reader sympathize with the literary genius of a rapist, Humbert.
The most abundantly present literary element in “Lolita” is imagery. It all begins his failure to come to terms with the ending of his affair with Annabel Leigh, his seaside childhood sweetheart, before her premature death from typhus. He describes the scene and the exstacy he experienced to an excessive degree, and often tries to channel what was, with Annabel, into what is and what can be, with Lolita. Humbert often freezes time and transfers readers into not only his current location but his state of mind. He describes Lolita on the court playing tennis, and the emotion that invokes in him, in minute detail; thus succeeding in securing her status of perpetual nymphet in the reader’s eye. Each time he revisits her in prose, it is as though Nabokov is painting an alluringly risqué picture; corrupt, yes; yet impossibly aesthetically enticing.
Conflict is also ever present in Nabokov’s novel. Humbert constantly fights with himself over the moralities of his innermost feelings. He is accepting of the social mores of the time, he knows what he is doing is brute-esque and wildly inappropriate. He tries to comment here and there about times and places where having affairs with someone so many years a mans minor is the norm; he describes a medieval king marrying his twelve year old cousin, still he knows his actions are highly deplorable. His humor and ironic statements make an effectual counterpoint to the pathos of the wretched plot. Humbert makes is clear that he loves Lolita and ever thing about her, and so he is anguished with the fact that his love isn’t paralleled. He must constantly persuade, threaten, and even bribe his little love to keep her compliant. Sporadically, Humbert congratulates himself on his cleverness, and even refers to himself as a "magician." Yet at other moments, Humbert comes to realize how despicable he is being. Regrettably, the rare flicker of clarity is too transitory to liberate Humbert from his obsession with his little "nymphet" and so Humbert resigns to this enslavement as his undeniable fate.
The diction in “Lolita” is what sets the novel apart; the presentation of content is far from objectionable, what perturbs most people is the subject matter itself.
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