Lolita

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject. The novel's narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with a prepubescent girl.

Style and interpretation

The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used "faunlet".

Related Topics:
Word play - Pun - Anagram - Faunlet

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Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European émigré. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".

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