Unreliable Narrator & Implied Author

The initial publication of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1955 by the Olympia Press is now valued as a classic of contemporary literature. Although it has received much attention, criticism on Lolita has not been persuasive enough to counteract its early notorious reputation.Lolita is condemned mainly for its ambiguities of morality or authorial position. Critics reproach Nabokov for his extreme aestheticism that totally ignores morality. The narrator is endowed with too many rhetorical privileges in exonerating himself. While the novel cries out for a condemnation, a judgment, yet for various reasons, it actually subverts the judgment-making capacity of the reader, resulting in readers' being in a dilemma. The author of the thesis thinks that to decode the narrator's rhetorical devices is an indispensable way to uncover the authorial position. In doing so, the ambiguities of morality can be possibly clarified.This thesis, based on Wayne C. Booth's theory of rhetoric, is undertaken to analyze the unreliable and implied author's rhetoric in Lolita. Booth's rhetoric does not refer to the rhetoric of diction or figures of speech that we employ for the effects of vividness, freshness and floweriness, but is related to the narrative mechanism of how the literary works communicate with the reader, how to achieve the reader's intensive engagement in the fictive world of literary works, and how to affect the reader from the perspective of morality.Unreliable narrator, implied author, distance and structural irony are crucial terms to this thesis. In Lolita, the rhetoric of unreliable narrator is controlled by the implied author for the effects of distance and structural irony. It finally reaches its ultimate goal—deciphering the true theme of Lolita.Rhetoric of the unreliable narrator is analyzed from four aspects: point of view, speeches, duality of the narrator and change in addressee. The unreliable narrator's rhetoric nearly succeeds in exonerating him from blame. Meanwhile, it causes distance between the implied author, the unreliable narrator and readers. That distance establishes in turn a structural irony, which fades away at the end with the disappearance of distance. By this process, the reader is actively involved in what is presented, feeling himself a sort of Humbert and recognizing the weakness of human beings. Once the rhetoric effect is achieved, the authorial position is self-unfolding and clear. Therefore, the Nabokovian aestheticism does not preclude morality but embeds it in the authorial rhetorical manipulation.