Thematic Analysis Of Nabokov’s Lolita By Viewing The Protagonist Humbert

Vladimir Nabokov is widely recognized as one of the most outstanding novelists known throughout the world, and he has produced a great many of works in his whole life, among which Lolita is usually known as his masterpiece, making him an evergreen tree in the literary world. In spite of the many difficulties and unexpected obstacles when it first came to the world, the novel has caused an unprecedented "Lolita frenzy" in the western world. Then as time goes on, the frenzy has spread to other parts of the world, and therefore researches and comments are growing rapidly. For the past few years, researches about the novel were focused on several fields such as moral criticism, psychological analysis, cultural politics, time urgency, artistic form and style and so on. And this paper attempts to analyze the theme of Lolita from the following three perspectives.After reading the novel carefully, I find out that there are altogether three themes Nabokov wants to tell us. They are human nature, the unpredictability of life and the philosophy of life shown through his famous theory called aesthetic bliss. Firstly, Humbert stands for the ordinary people, by whom we can clearly see the positive aspects and negative ones of human nature. On one hand, Humbert sticks to what he longs for regardless of any losses even though he always struggles between the ideal and the reality. Kind and well-bred, he attempts to behave on the basis of social principles and moral rules so as to restrain the natural desire; on the other hand, he is eager to realize some kind of evil desire just as same as the ordinary men, making him swinging between the bliss of desire fulfillment and self-accusation. Secondly, there are quite a lot of post-modern features in the description of Humbert and the many narrative techniques applied in the novel, such as uncertainty and absence, in this way, the writer aims to tell us that life is unpredictable, meaning that neither can we foresee the future nor realize the reality today. And this time Humbert stands for the ordinary life. Lastly, the dissertation analyzes two items with the name of "the temporal world" and "the other world", appealing that people should learn to rediscover human nature and life with an aesthetic eye by putting forward the writer’s noted theory "aesthetic bliss".After reading the novel, we become perplexed and we seem to step into a state that is totally an illusion. We are quite sure that everything is like flowers in the mirror and the moon’s reflection in water, but we firmly believe that nothing is more important than pursuing what we really want in the deep heart, even the sin is beautiful. And that is exactly where the writer wants to lead us to. Lolita is like a piece of dirge, sometimes gentle, sometimes crazy, making the readers attracted by the magic of the novel, and get ready to forgive everything.