The purpose of this research is to examine Nabokov's novel Lolita, in particular the different narrative styles of its two parts. The plan of the research will be to set forth the narrative frame of the text and then to discuss the patterns of ideas that are developed in each part of the narrative and the means by which the text makes these ideas the substance of a narrative program.
From the perspective of a popular culture in which pedophilia and various forms of child abuse are articulated and adumbrated everywhere from the nightly news to Oprah, one wonders what all the fuss was about regarding the scandal that appears to have attended the publication and dissemination of Lolita in the United States in 1955. It is as if over the course of some 50 years the pendulum of shock value has swung from a dogged and fragile prudery toward an unshockable relaxation that fairly revels in its thoughtless hedonism. The action and characterization of Lolita itself can also be interpreted as a movement or more exactly interplay of opposites, dualities, symmetries, or some other version of doubling.
The narrative text is presented in two parts; however, there are really four components to Lolita. The foreword by the factitious Dr. John Ray, Jr., psychiatric practitioner, and the postscript attributed to Nabokov (who in context must be taken as equally factitious) serve the function of positioning, or book-ending, as it were, the balance of the text. More will be said about how the framing is operationalized. According to Morton, the elements of narrative are organized so that "the foreword balances the aestheticism that dominates Part One, while the postscript balances the moralism of Part Two" (81). What that refers to is that the foreword is presented as a psychiatric analysis of a certain pathological patient type and a caution to the reader to be prepared for both shocking affect and the implicit moral lesson to be derived from Humbert's...