Nabokov Lolita Literary Analysis

Although English is not Nabokov’s first language, not even the second, he is known for his impeccable English prose. However, paradoxically, when Nabokov is asked whether he feels he has “any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer,” he replies it is “the absence of a natural vocabulary” (S.O., 106). Specifically, he bemoans that his English is “stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when [he needs] the shortest road between warehouse and shop” (S.O., 106). Similarly, the narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, faces the same predicament. On the one hand, like Nabokov, Humbert writes suffocatingly beautiful English …show more content…
When asked “what are the literary virtues [he seeks] to attain”, Nabokov replies “mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express” (S.O., 181). Nabokov is so concerned with his literary style because he believes it is the writer’s responsibility to create a new world, as he says a creative writer “must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world” (S.O., 32), and words are the bricks with which he constructs a reality. For Nabokov, “what [he feels] to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage” (S.O., 112), rather than the “average reality perceived by all of us, ”, which Nabokov dismisses as he says “that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional humdrummery, current editorials” (S.O., 118). It is also in creating this artistic world that Nabokov finds pleasure, which is the reason why Nabokov writes books at all, as he says: “Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions” (S.O., 16). Since Nabokov derives his pleasure from writing that creates an abstract world, while Nabokov considers his lack of “a natural tongue” a disadvantage, such disadvantage and his ignorance of America and American 12-year-old girls might in fact benefit him, because the more culturally ignorant of America and linguistically incompetent in domestic vocabulary Nabokov is, the more challenging the book Lolita is. As he admits, rather than being able to simply record what he actually sees, he has to imagine what looks like and how American girls speak, as he says, he“[has] to invent America and Lolita” (S.O., 26). Hence, the book