Your Novel

Include at LEAST four direct quotations from your novel per point that you make

Outside Research

Topic Sentence 1: Nabokov’s artistic writing style is designed to deceive the reader into sympathy for his characters.

- “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (Nabokov 1)

-“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” (Nabokov 1)

-“One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangled me.” (Nabokov 18)

-“I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit vert.” (Nabokov 40)

-“ Humbert seeks to defend his attraction to young girls. This is done by ascribing otherworldly, magical attributes to himself, being “enchanted”. The implication is that his actions are guided by the nymphet. He is not in full control of himself, having lost himself in his obsession with Lolita.” (Wasmuth 13)

-“ Every reader who grapples with this book and finds oneself cheering Humbert on in his seduction attempts and feels curiously let down after some of these attempts are thwarted is implicated. Nabokov is slyly subversive and the reader, like Lolita, is lured within Humbert's range of vision.” (Jones 3)

Topic Sentence 2:

By characterizing Humbert as un unreliable narrator, Nabokov breaks identification with Humbert’s morals.

-“The fact that to me the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a fore-runner of insanity.” (Nabokov 18)

- “What I present her is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim.” (Nabokov 68)

-“The journal of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.” (Nabokov 71)

-“Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory” (Nabokov 217)

- “textual signals that point to Humbert being an unreliable narrator are the following: (1) admitting to fallible memory; (2) claiming to have a duty to reproduce texts according to their original state yet making biased revisions to them; (3) implying the possession of photographic memory yet mixing up the order of past events; as illustrated by several examples he makes use of lies to obtain his goals; (4) reiterating ‘Lolita’ which denotes high emotional involvement; (5) attempting to influence the reader by emphasizing his alleged insanity.” (Wasmuth 5)

-“ There are thus at least two ‘plots’ in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the consciousness of the creator above it – the ‘real plot’ which is visible in the ‘gaps’ and ‘holes’ in the narrative” (Kinney 4)

Topic Sentence 3:

Nabokov uses the duality of doppelgangers to simultaneously justify and conquer Humbert’s hierarchy of beauty. (parody, known double and parodic twin)

-“I would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother.” (Nabokov 76)

-“Never had I thought that the rather ridiculous, though rather Handsome Mrs. Haze…could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid my hands upon her…The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration.” (Nabokov 75-76)

-“I felt suffocated as [Quilty] rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over hum. We rolled over us.” (Nabokov 299)

-“ “Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment” (Nabokov 272)

-“ Through Humbert’s confession, he is transformed into someone capable of greater empathy, comprehending the other and renouncing a world of narcissistic fantasies.” (McMinn 1)

- “What is so adorable in Humbert's girl-child--Lolita's crass vulgarity, slovenliness, and her refusal to look at the world using Humbert's aesthetic lens--is all made to seem grotesquely loathsome in the mother. Humbert also spares nothing as he catalogues Charlotte's corporal imperfections and remains depressed at the sight of this "handsome" woman. Charlotte has too much of what Lolita has so little.” (Jones 2)

-“Like Nabokov, Humbert calls his reader brother (“Reader! Bruder!” [262]) as he attempts to justify his crime, but while Nabokov hopes his readers will be ideal critical interpreters, Humbert attempts to win his readers’ sympathy for his criminal treatment of Dolores Haze. 3 In the process of writing his double tale, however, Humbert gains selfawareness and wants to atone for his sins. He writes his “confession” as the history of his discovery of his “evil double” in Quilty,4 employing the genre so precisely that it must be considered intentional.” (Meyer 2)

Topic Sentence 4/ Conclusion:

In creating a dangerous work of art, it is the artist’s responsibility to maintain a moral order hence the fate of Humbert.

-“[Lolita,] Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby.” (Nabokov 309)

-“I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor.” (Nabokov 62)

-“I intended with the most fervent force and foresight. To protect the purity of that twelve-year old child.” (Nabokov 63)

-“Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.” (Nabokov 308)

“In Lolita, Humbert exploits the discrepancy between the Humbert of the past through which the majority of the novel is focalized, and the Humbert of the present who narrates; he creates the impression that the narrating Humbert sincerely repents the crimes of the narrated Humbert in an attempt to encourage readers’ sympathy and condonation of his horrible acts.” (Kinney 5)

-“ ‘Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.’ One of the three roles Nabokov assigns to writers is the teacher, to whom we turn “for a moral education,” or a lesson.” (Kinney 7)