Rhetorical Devices In Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Random house, 1955.

The novel Lolita tells the story of the obsessive Humbert Humbert and his travels across the states with his step-daughter (Dolores, a.ka. Lolita), as he tries to force her to be his mistress. The novel starts with Humbert moving into Dolores’s mother’s home. In a turn of terrible events, Dolores’s mother dies and Humbert takes that as an opportunity to, in a way, kidnap Dolores, and drag her with him on the road. The author, Vladimir Nabokov, studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College in Cambridge and has written several other books, as well as a myriad of short stories. Nabokov writes in a very specific way; a way that appeals to pathos. The book is written purposefully to make Humbert seem like the victim. He starts with the detailed and romanticized story of his childhood and his first love. When he starts the book this way, readers are more likely to feel for Humbert. One rhetorical device Humbert’s character utilizes often is repetition. He’s writing this

story from his prison cell while he awaits trial, and he continually addresses the reader as “ladies and gentlemen of the jury!” The repetition shows his true madness. He is writing to a jury about this twisted crime, which he still believes is love, even though he is being tried for an entirely different charge. The novel Lolita itself could be seen as biased, as the language is very persuasive of Humbert’s case, but it can also be very open to interpretation. Many readers see Humbert as an obsessive pedophile and rapist, while others see him as a suffering man that was seduced by a “nymphet.”
Because this is the actual source of the argument, it supplies a lot of details for (and possibly against) it. A lot of responses talked about how passionate and tortured Humbert was, and how heartbreaking it was that he couldn’t be with Lolita, but one specific line of the book disproves this, and really shows how abusive and menacing Humbert really was (this is taken from the fourth chapter, as he describes his first childhood love that he has always held onto), “-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since — until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.” Reading this back, it really shows how Humbert Humbert’s only intentions were to find a living embodiment of someone he lost as a child, regardless of how they felt.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Random House, 2003.
Azar Nafisi’s memoir details her experiences as a professor in Iran, and teaching a few students a collection of classic Western novels in secret.

One of these novels is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. She relates the struggles of Dolores Haze to her and her students living under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Nafisi establishes her credibility with her professor credentials and her years of teaching at the University of Tehran. She definitely appeals to pathos by sharing her students (and her own) thoughts on the novel, especially in relation to their own lives, “Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students’ hidden personal sorrows and joys.” Nafisi utilizes a metaphor for Dolores’s character, comparing her to the “half alive butterfly pinned to the wall.” This source could be seen as biased, as she is putting her very personal opinions into the text, and including those of her

students’.

Overall, this memoir was very interesting and gives a lot of different viewpoints of Nabokov’s work. One line of Nafisi’s book stood out to me, “There, on the very first page, he adumbrates her various names, names for different occasions, Lo, Lola, and in his arms always Lolita. We are also informed of her “real” name, Dolores, the Spanish word for pain.” This means a lot, as she goes on to talk about how Lolita never really existed. Humbert Humbert creates this twisted version of Dolores, painting her as a nymphet capable of this level of seduction.
This book really explores the deeper meaning behind a lot of Nabokov’s words, like the butterfly metaphor.

Tamir-Ghez, Nomi The Art of Persuasion in Lolita, 1979
In The Art of Persuasion in Lolita, an essay featured in the Poetics Today journals, Ghez discusses the factor of Nabokov's unreliable narrator in his novel. He writes about how readers of Lolita are often lead to feeling for Humbert, even identifying with him in some ways. He quotes journalist Norman Miller, “‘Lolita . . . can be quite simply described as an assault on the reader," who "softened by the power of appeal is . . . ready to forgive all.’” It is a “strange effect” and comes from Nabokov’s distinct style of writing and his use of rhetorics. The author of this essay pulls from other journalist’s thoughts of Nabokov’s novel to establish his claim. Logos is utilized a lot in this text, as Ghez repeats the fact that Humbert committed several crimes, yet readers are still drawn towards pity. He uses a metaphor, that Nabokov himself once used, to compare the writing to playing chess against yourself, where the author has made “‘certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts-’” Ghez’s essay is not very biased; it takes facts and excerpts from Nabokov’s writing to prove their point. It is very outdated, but all of the information and facts used remain true and relevant.
This essay is very beneficial to research on this topic; it gives an opportunity to explore the idea of “unreliable narrators” and how they are used in Lolita. It’s easy to understand that Lolita had an unreliable narrator, but Ghez’s research really expands that understanding. The essay’s explanation of Nabokov’s use of different rhetorical devices to twist the reader's mind furthers anyone’s knowledge or curiosity of the topic.