Lolita
...ally, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.” These games can also be noticed in the case of rhetorical questions, because he interrogates and he is the one who answers his own questions, too: “Is Lo in her room?...She is not…Is she still brushing her teeth? No.” Irony is placed everywhere, which makes the reader consider the reading activity as a sort of game – nothing should be considered as serious (or at least, this was my impression): “May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of "abdominal flu" (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June.” And the personal considerations about himself and other characters are hilarious: “I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush”; “I really think she (Lolita) should wash her hair once in a while”;”Haze smokedher tenth cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo”. Sometimes it seems that time has no chronological order, which again gives the impression of playfulness, and, of course, of fragmentation and even incoherence (other postmodernist features): for example, the narrator speaks about May, the 30th and then he goes back a few days before. It is used the frame story technique: while telling what happened on Monday, he stops the story to reveal “the median age of pubescence” and then he goes way back in time, mentioning Virginia: “ diary resumed”. The journal (diary) technique is usually realistic (or at least the author makes it seem realistic), but in this case we get the feeling of unreliability most of the times: “(Beginning perhaps amended.)” Another aspect is the use of many details. The descriptions are extremely detailed. Humbert Humbert notices things lacking importance and consequence, but which denote the interest in the way a girl looks like: „Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food”. His observations seem unrelevant, maybe because of the fact that there is no specific centre to make reference to. The narrator passes from one character to the other without any connection at all: Humbert Humbert speaks about Lolita, then he expresses his horror concerning the McCoo girl and the next sentence is dedicated to Mrs. Haze. The following excerpt speaks for itself: “Prying her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. Checked frock.” What I personally find captivating is the fact that the narrator (Humbert Humbert) refers to himself by means of the 3rd person: “Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one's slangy speech”; “somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid”; „a brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly”. It is true that he is inconsistent, but he does it in a playful way. This diary is similar to a telegram because of the short or elliptic sentences (“Very warm day”; “Rain. Lake of the rains. Mamma out shopping”; “I out, she in” or “Bloated feeling. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from yhe room”. Grandma is visiting”) and because of the stops: “ping” or “pause”. It also resembles a report, as if it were the orderly hour: “let me state…”. Concerning the social elements, I noticed that Lolita’s great hobby was “her green-red-blue comics”, which were highly appreciated by teen-agers in America at that time (around 1947 – when the action takes place). The influence of the media is also to be taken into account: - television: “The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter”; - Hollywood mania: “as Hollywood teaches”; - magazines: comics, “Glance and Gulp”, “Ramsdale Journal”. It is important to remind the fact that Lolita, although at the age of 12, had a very strong sense of democracy; the idea of independence, of liberty is clearly pointed out by her: “This is a free country”. I also noticed the influence of psychanalysts; there is a sort of self-introspection based on a hypothetical case. It is interesting that because o...