An Interpretation Of Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov From The Perspective Of Postmodernism

Vladimir,Nabokov,a Russian American writer,is widely recognized as one of the most considerable writers and stylists in the 20 th century,as well as one of the representative figures of the postmodern literature.Lolita is Nabokov’s most spreading novel.And it has also been considered as one of his most representative and controversial works in the literary field.The novel mainly tells an abnormal love story in which a middle-aged man Humbert desires for a 12-year-old girl whom he names Lolita.The plot of the novel is simple.However,the moral and ethical themes which it explores,the complicated structure as well as the uncommon language make it difficult to understand and attract attentions from numerous critics of different countries.In 1950 s,American society achieves the transformation from postmodernism to modernism.While from the perspective of literature development,there is no boundary between them.It brings about a phenomenon that writers of the same period may represent different literary schools.And Nabokov is absolutely a typical example to prove it.As Nabokov is once a mature modernist while later he transforms himself into a representative writer of postmodernism.Nabokov has almost accomplished his conversion during the period of creating the novel Lolita.Hence Lolita possesses characteristics of postmodernism.This thesis aims to conduct a research on its postmodern characteristics of his creation in order to analyze Nabokov’s postmodern consciousness in his masterpiece Lolita progressively.The thesis consists of six parts with the first part serves as the introduction telling us the life story and main works of Vladimir Nabokov.The first chapter also includes a brief introduction to Lolita as well as the literature review at home and abroad,and the significance of the thesis is also presented.The second chapter analyzes the origin and development of postmodernism,its definition,the characteristics of postmodernism including uncertainty,parody,meta-fiction and so on.The body part of the thesis includes chapter three,chapter four,chapter five and chapter six.In the third chapter,the thesis analyzes indeterminacy in Lolita in which the indeterminacy of the thesis,the plot and the figures are discussed.The fourth chapter analyzes parody in Lolita including the parody of the love subject,parody of different literary genres,and parody of Freudianism and psychoanalysis.The fifth chapter explores meta-fiction in the novel.In this section,the writer presents a detailed explanation on the unreliability of the first-person narrator,the unstability of personal perspective,the multi-stratification of nested narrating,and the integration of life with artistic elements.This thesis draws a conclusion in the sixth chapter.It again emphasizes the similarities between the postmodern theories and the fiction and the significance of the thesis.Hence it comes to the conclusion that Lolita is a postmodernist novel.