An Analysis Of Lolita’s Artistic Features From The Perspective Of Postmodernism

Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American, has been regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, who possesses special understanding and amazing creativity on literature and art. His works impress a large number of readers deeply not only by vivid description of characters, delicate details and particular structures but also by mysterious word games. So Nabokov is also widely recognized as one of the outstanding literary stylists in the world.Nabokov is a prolific writer, who has created many famous works, among which the greatest achievement is the novel, such as Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and Ada. These novels have been attracting the attention of critics throughout the world, and his unique writing style and creative idea have also been raising controversy in the world literature.Lolita, Nabokov’s masterpiece, has also been attracting the eyes of critics all over the world by its special postmodern artistic features. In Lolita, Nabokov uses narrative skills and plays word games to reveal the artistic value of this story. Lolita has attained a classic status and has become one of the best-known and most controversial novels of the twentieth century.As the pioneer of the American postmodern novels, Lolita is notable for the innovative text form, the exquisite narrative strategy and the unique language style. The research significance of this thesis is to make the reader understand this novel’s theme more deeply through an intensive study on Lolita’s postmodern artistic features, which is useful for the reader to research other postmodern works in the way of narrative and language. Meanwhile, this thesis is instructive for the reader to study the historical change from modern literature to postmodern literature. So this thesis will make a comprehensive analysis on Lolita’s postmodern artistic features.This thesis is divided into three main parts including introduction, body and conclusion. The Introduction of this thesis mainly talks about Nabokov’s achievements, his works and the criticism of his works. Meanwhile, it also makes a brief introduction to the content of Lolita and its great controversy that the novel suffers after its first publication as well as its research status and research results at home and abroad. This part puts forward the research perspective and the basic idea of this thesis.The body of this thesis can be divided into four chapters. Chapter One is the theoretical basis of this thesis. It mainly discusses the postmodern literature’s background and its special artistic features. And it briefly explains Lolita’s distinct postmodern artistic features by combining with the theory. So Chapter One defines the research direction and the basic structure.Chapter Tow is about indeterminacy of Lolita. In order to stress Lolita’s unreality, Nabokov deliberately creates many uncertain characters with uncertain names and designs a series of fictive plots. At the end of this novel, these characters are all dead at last, so the opening end can make readers find out this novel’s falsity and indeterminacy instead of treating this novel as an autobiography. So Chapter Two mainly presents indeterminacy by dealing with uncertainty of characters, maze of plot structure and miscellaneous themes.Chapter Three discusses various narrative strategies employed in this novel. In Lolita, Nabokov uses the first-person narration to unfold the story, in order to highlight the ironic intention. He creates a confessional narrator, Humbert, to start the story, by this way it not only can gain readers’ compassion but also can express Humbert’s various guiltiness and dark sides by himself. Meanwhile, Nabokov deliberately reduces Lolita’s voice to show her endless misery. Actually, Nabokov is the real controller of the novel, who disguises himself as Doctor Ray. All of this is required by using various narrative strategies, which will be presented in Chapter Three from three aspects: first-person narration, unreliable narrator and duality of narratee and the implied author’s ironic voice.Chapter Four concerns about diversified language games, which makes Lolita so hard to understand. As a work of art, Nabokov is extremely adept in playing with words to build a maze in order to display Lolita’s mystery, which makes readers feel confused and dazzled. Lolita is written in poetic prose mixed with French, Russian and Nabokovian English. And in Lolita, Nabokov uses plenty of allusions, puns and parody to express its special postmodern artistic features. So this chapter will discuss the language games by analyzing parody, a flowery world of words and the style of poetic prose.In conclusion, Lolita is really a remarkable work of art, bearing the banquet of languages, the art of designs and the gathering of narrative strategies, which has been regarded as one of the most famous postmodern novels in the world. So there is no doubt that Lolita is a classic postmodern achievement in an art. This triumph lies not only in attractive languages and subtle details that Nabokov deliberately designs but also in his inventive narrative style and writing form. Like a great magician, Nabokov is indulged in creating his own artistic world where he tries his best to make readers immersed by using his special literary skills.