Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho both show the stories of seemingly regular men based off of how they interact with people in their lives while in public view. The main characters from each novel are not normal functioning men of society. Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita is a middle aged man who has an obsession with young girls around the age of twelve. Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s American Psycho is an incredibly narcissistic, egotistic, man who

seduced to identify and indulge in their own desires, but by no means specifically perversion, to then cloud the reader’s judgement of whether Humbert is guilty or not. Surely for the reader to then condemn him, they would be condemning themselves too? Nabokov himself states that “I[he] is neither a writer or a reader of didactic fiction. Lolita has no moral tow… fiction affords me to enter... aesthetic bliss” . The power of appeal is where the true obscenity lies; between the reader and the narrator of

structure of the works. A canonical novel is not superior due to its plot or relevance, but rather the finesse of its writing, which is left for the reader to discover. When reading a canonical work, one must read it properly to understand its quality. Nabokov and Bloom concur that to respect the author, one must read without previous bias. If a work contains both aspects, that work may constitute a piece worthy of literary merit. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka exemplifies a short story worth of such

Should the Reader Forgive Humbert? Lolita, by Vladamir Nabokov is a controversial book that elaborately represents and forces the reader to deal with a pedophiles obsession with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. As the reader finishes reading Lolita, he must establish a meaning for the novel which hinges heavily upon whether or not he should forgive Humbert for his rape of Lolita and for stealing her childhood away from her. This rape is legally referred to as a statutory rape because Humbert is having

“My book has ugly elements to it… Sometimes you have to walk through the muck to get to the message. There are so many complicated situations out there. And we can begin to give kids the tools they need to deal with it, if only to say, ‘You are not alone.’” (Sherman Alexie, qtd. in The Guardian). How necessary or valuable are the “ugly elements” of your chosen novels? Novelists more or less develop strategies throughout their texts to distance themselves from the ideas and desires that they are

The use of language in literature can affect the way in which the reader interprets something. Language allows authors to manipulate the specific meaning he or she chooses to create. In the novel Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, employs language in a specific manner meant to stimulate emotion in the reader. Rather than exposing him as a pedophile, the narrator’s altering speech is intended to accentuate the artistic nature for his inappropriate relationship with

Vladimir Nabokov, a world-famous immigrant writer from Russia, who spent the second half of his life in the United States teaching and creating his works, had a very distinctive and peculiar opinion on many of the internationally recognized literary masterpieces, and particularly he had quite a skeptical attitude towards some outstanding works of Russian literature – for example, he refused to recognize the significance of Dostoyevsky's novels, and he openly criticized the writer in his famous lectures:

with them, so he can have his normal life back. As the parents are making plans for their son to come home, the father is dying from his sickness, but he wants no help from doctors. “To the devil with doctors! We must get him out of there quick” (Nabokov 85). Focused on getting their son home, they get an

because Humbert "injects [his] image [of Lolita]” (Rutledge 47) with the same powerful emotions “[he] feels for [her]" (47) in his account. Furthermore, while Humbert concedes that the reader "may jeer at [him], and threaten to clear the court" (Nabokov 278), he still insists "the world know how much [he] loved [his] Lolita" (278). By injecting a "sufficient degree of love" (Rutledge 47) into the real and romantic depiction of Lolita, Humbert "has become a poet" (47) because he "is able to express

perception of Gregor. She changes her attitude from pity to resentment. Gregor’s father shows only feelings of contempt and violence towards Gregor, because he sees Gregor as a burden and often lashes out at him. Which explains the quote from Mr. Nabokov, “Gregor is a human being in an insect’s disguise; his family are insects disguised as people”.