The Book Lolita

Lolita

The book Lolita is a highly controversial novel written by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita tells the story of a man, Humbert Humbert, and his utter infatuation with a young “nymphet” named Lolita. The book and subsequent film adaptations, specifically Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation aim to create a feeling of sympathy for the protagonist, Humbert Humbert. Through the use of first person narration, Humbert Humbert is able to manipulate readers with simple inaccuracies, making him an unreliable narrator.

The term unreliable narrator was famously coined by Wayne Booth in Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth defines the reliable and unreliable narrator in the following way: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (158-59). In other words, when a narrator expresses values and perceptions that strikingly diverge from those of the implied author he is deemed unreliable. Moreover, once a narrator is deemed unreliable, then this unreliability will be consistent throughout the work, according to Booth (158).

When a narrator is unreliable, there is a conflict between the narrator’s presentation and the rest of the narrative, which makes readers suspect his sincerity. There are three sources of unreliability; the narrator’s limited knowledge, his personal involvement, and his questionable morals. When narrators display a personal involvement the story, they portray characters or events in a subjective way Lastly, if the implied author does not share the narrator’s moral values then his morals are considered questionable. If they do share moral values then the narrator is un...

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...asserting his claims of illness.

The notion of an unreliable narrator can also be seen in Kubrick’s 1962 Lolita. There are ways in which Kubrick plays with the gap between perception and reality. There is a quite masterful moment when Charlotte, Lolita’s mother and recently Humbert’s wife, discovers Humbert’s true desires upon reading his journal. Humbert, believing Charlotte to be upstairs, yells bald-faced lies at the ceiling while he prepares his wife a conciliatory martini. He then receives a phone call telling him that Mrs. Humbert has been struck by a car. The timing is set up so perfectly that it seems ridiculous to us, too, that Charlotte, who was last seen fleeing into her room, could have just been killed, yet she was. However, Kubrick’s film provides an objective view of the events occurring in the novel by refusing to rely heavily upon voiceover.