The Unreliable Narrator in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

"Distracted by his charm, his wit, his intelligence, and - yes - his murderer's fancy prose style, we may momentarily forget that he is indeed the monster he says he is" (Rivers and Nicol 153).

In his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he felt the "first little throb of Lolita" run through him as he read a newspaper article about an ape who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." The image of a confinement so complete that it dominates and shapes artistic expression (however limited that expression may be) is a moving and powerful one, and it does, indeed, reflect in the text of Lolita. Humbert Humbert, the novel's eloquent poet-narrator, observes the world through the bars of his obsession, his "nympholepsy", and this confinement deeply affects the quality of his narration. In particular, his powerful sexual desires prevent him from understanding Lolita in any significant way, so that throughout the text what he describes is not the real Lolita, but an abstract creature, without depth or substance beyond the complex set of symbols and allusions that he associates with her. When in his rare moments of exhaustion Humbert seems to lift this literary veil, he reveals for a moment the violent contrast between his intricately manipulated narration and the stark ugliness of a very different truth.

In one of the most elaborately vivid scenes in the novel, Humbert excites himself to a sexual climax while Lolita sits, unaware, on his lap. Rejoicing in the unexpected and unnoticed fulfillment, he asserts that, "Lolita ha[s] been safely solipsized" (60)...

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Centerwall, Brandon S. "Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32 (1990): 468-84.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1992. Rivers, J.E., Charles Nicol. Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on his Life's Work. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.