own words. Bader describes the foreword as a "parody of the instructive appreciations that commonly preface works on controversial subjects," chiefly because it mingles comfortable middle-class moralism with clinically compassionate diagnosis. Thus "Dr. Ray" (as Bader notes) characterizes Humbert's story as a "tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than moral apotheosis" (Nabokov 5). Indeed, that foreword has something of the solemnity of the venereal-disease health films that used to be shown in high school assemblies.
The postscript, meanwhile, deliberately belies the clinical solemnity of the foreword:
I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss (Nabokov 308).
The declaration of aestheticism of course belongs to Nabokov as author of Lolita, but there is a double effect at work here as well, if the postscript is to be considered part of the novel
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