Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita - Book Report/Review Example

bert's crafty rhetoric, through its "tantalising allusions to a variety of genres," precludes his story's inevitable end, "misdirecting any readerly desire for closure", to avoid any final moral conclusion. [Tweedie, 2] According to him Nabokov's novel "occupies a place on the literary map akin to those cartographic idiosyncrasies," allowing the author and reader "to wander into different forms, using their often vastly different conventions." [Tweedie, 4] Tweedie tends to tone down the ethical questions underlying the literary project saying that in an "environment marked by severe initial crimes and admissions, Humbert's less severe transgressions, his everyday incivilities, become more humorous than damning.

" [Tweedie, 1] Unlike Tweedie's study, which focuses on the novel's literary exploration, Lionel Trilling in 'The Last Lover: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita,' turns to the theme and content of the novel as most reviewers of the novel . It is about love."[Trilling, 5] Trilling's study explores Nabokov's treatment of "a love, which European literature has dealt with since time immemorial but with especial intensity since the Arthurian romances, and the code of courtly love" [Trilling, 9]. He claims that using romance motifs of a tabooed passion Nabakov effectively "puts the lovers, as lovers in literature must be put, beyond the pale of society" [Trilling, 8].

Yet, apparently caught in the same "emotional trap" that he suspects Nabokov has set for his readers, [Trilling, 11] Trilling's review fails to reconcile Humbert's sexual abuse of young Lolita with the romance motifs and/or courtly love conventions that he attributes to their relationship. Dana Brand's review 'The Interaction of Aestheticism and American Consumer Culture in Nabokov's Lolita,' helps in understanding the implicit "aesthetic morality" of Nabakov's novel. According to her Lolita effectively addresses the issue of "individual autonomy" and the new coercive authority of mass culture in the United States; it satirises the way American's constructs their identity and view of the world based on "images of normalcy" offered by advertising and mass culture (14).

While Humbert's aesthetic alienation from American social and commercial environment helps him to resist commercial objectification initially, ultimately he permits his aestheticism to degenerate into a version of the consumption (Brand, 14-5). Brand asserts: "in his decline from aestheticism to consumerism, Humbert no longer finds the source of his gratification in his imagination, as he locates it, rather, in an external commoditized object whose independence threatens to deprive him of all gratification" (Brand, 20).

She comments that Humbert places Lolita back into