Lolita: rough draft

 Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has become an incredibly popular and controversial book over the years. The controversy is due to the sensitive content and the point of view that it chosen to deal with that content. If you were to hear about a book written on the subject of pedophilia you would obviously assume that it was done with a very negative attitude towards the subject, or at the very least, an unbiased informative point of view. Nabokov does not care what you were expecting. He ignores all of those assumptions you would anticipate from society; he chose to narrate from the point of view from a pedophile which contradicts everything you expect as a reader.

Reading this book leads to many contradictions. During Lolita the reader experiences many different responses to what they have just encoutered; you really enjoy the beautiful writing and the humor that pops up every now and then, but you hate the story and the things happening in the book. When we hear about the context of this book happening in the world we are, of course, disgusted, and it is easy and understandable to hate the person responsible and hate everything about the situation. Nabokov gives you a funny guy who had a ill experience as a child and wasn't able to recover properly. He takes a very trustworthy character slot of narrator, a position we are inclined to automatically trust as we get close for the next few hundred pages,  and fills it with someone we want to hate in every way and certainly don't want to trust.


 Another contradiction is the strange fact that you continually find yourself questioning whether Humbert is telling us the truth. In the beginning, although already noticing the lack of moral fiber, you trust that everything you are being told is the truth; after all if Humbert is willing to tell you anything about his obsession with "nymphets" at all why would he lie about the details or about other things? Although it is out natural inclination to trust that the narrator is telling the truth, on the very first page Humbert says, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the...." Right there on the very first page he has just referred to the reader as a jury; this completely throws you off on whether or not you can trust anything he is saying. By turning you into a jury member he has turned you into someone he wants to sway towards a certain verdict; someone he may want to deceive. Through out the book Humbert tell you about several convenient deaths. The first time when Humbert tells us how he went looking for his first wife after she left him for a taxi driver and finds out she has died in child birth was not too strange. But whenever you add on the other deaths such as the most convenient, Lolita's mother just after she discovers his obsession, you begin to question whether all of these deaths are really accidental. Are you, the jury, really getting the whole true story?