Reading Lolita In Tehran Analysis

Fiction allows for people to escape from reality while existing in it at the same time. Rather than entirely disregarding the realities of the world, they can reconfigure their views of reality in whatever way they see fit. In the essay “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become,” Barbara Fredrickson discusses how people interact with each other, and in doing so, they can share their differing views. Alternatively, the therapist Leslie Bell, in the essay “Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom,” discusses topics regarding the conflicts women face when interacting with others in the context of relationships. However, Bell’s ideas can also be expanded to discuss a scope broader than …show more content…
Azar Nafisi, a former literature professor, also reviews the conflicts faced by herself and other women in Iran regarding freedom of expression, in the memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” These topics from the three texts are significant because they allow for a discussion of the mindsets of different people. In this paper, I will argue that individuals form unique types of fictional worlds in their minds which affect how they behave with others, resulting in a constrained outlook on their lives. These fictional worlds are formed so people can cope with the fact that they have little control over reality.
The formation of fictional worlds allows for individuals to have differing perspectives of their lives. The term fictional world refers to a type of mentality a person has regarding their life and environment, but the use of the term is not restricted to this definition. Each individual’s unique ideas and experiences allow for them to connect with other people over the differences between their mentalities. Fredrickson’s essay focuses heavily on the idea of connections between people and she uses the term positivity resonance to discuss this topic. She describes positivity resonance as a