On Monday, April 22, 2013
“All
at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each
other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might
have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every
particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate
as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so”
Lolita
is all about deception to the reader and how manipulative a writer can strive
to be. Lolita was a very special book in that the narrative tells you from the
beginning that he may or may not be a completely honest and reliable source to
trust to tell his story. Immediately we are implanted with the fact that this
narrator is suspicious. A small fragment of disbelief is always present but
then shockingly disappears as the story is told.
Humbert
slowly tells the tale of a forbidden fruit love that he holds with a young girl
Dolores. At first we are shocked by his twisted fantasies with 14 year old
girls but little do we know we are being sucked down the rabbit hole beneath
our feet.
As
the story progresses his descriptions became less uncomfortable and I began
actually questioning whether or not this kidnapped and drugged little girl actually
had feelings from Humbert. The book’s planning was just that good in that it
tricked me to question Dolores at times when clearly she was the victim in this
story.
Lolita
is a very successful book in the sense that it elicits a response from the
audience that is exactly what Vladimir Nabokov’s intent. The audience is taken
away on this false love story and spit out at the end with an icky sweaty bed
sheet feeling in the end. I found myself being discusted that I had ever
believed Humbert to begin with let alone feel challenged that I had been lead
along by an author for this amount of time.
