11/16/2023 0 Comments Unreliable narratorThus, creating two realities – one that of the narrator and that of the hero (Durantaye 36). Humbert tells histories from his point of view. The readers are convinced that the narrator is unreliable, but he has created a world of his own within the fictional boundaries of the novel. The creation of reality through fiction gives credibility to the narrator. The separation of the author and the text and the presence of an unreliable narrator who is also the pedophiliac hero of the story put the readers in a dilemma, and they have to actively participate in the narrative to unravel the truth. Thus, this separation of the author from the text establishes a narrative level that lies between him and the text. In this unparalleled meta-fictional novel, Nabokov removes himself completely from the text and presents textual authority to Humbert, the unreliable narrator/hero of the story, in order to defend his pedophiliac inclinations (Durantaye 33). In this paper, I argue that the narrator consciously creates unrealistic, inconsistent, and unreliable accounts to blur the line between fiction and reality, thus manipulating the perception of the reader to actively participate in the unraveling of the riddle presented in multi-textual narration within the novel. In a way, Nabokov openly declares to the readers that the narrator is manipulating them, thus, making them more skeptical and doubtful of the reliability of the story (Zerweck 152). This intensifies the task of manipulation of the readers’ perception. The question of the narrator’s reliability automatically invades the readers’ minds, and their unwitting identification with the pervert narrator enrages them (Tamir-Ghez 65). Further, the authors put readers in a dilemma as they do not know if they should believe the narrator because he says that he has written the book in fifty-six days when confined in a psychiatric ward (Durantaye 43). Thus, staging Humbert as the narrator, as well as the hero of the book, presents a unique problem of justification of the facts presented. In the case of Nabokov’s Lolita, the problem intensifies as the narrator presents the novel in an autobiographical form (Moore 73).
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