On The Ethical Revelation Of Lolita In Irony

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most important and irreplaceable writer in American literary world.As his famous novel,Lolita has had a high level of worldwide influence.It narrates by a middle-aged man with pedophilia,who tells his love story through his own perspective.In the story,he insists that he loves Lolita,a twelve years old Amerian girl,more than anyone and how he regrets about the hurts he imposesd on her.Because of the sensitive subject and the charming character,which should have repelled readers,Lolita was controversial as soon as it published.Many popular scholars criticize Lolita by asking whether its subject is moral,immoral or amoral.Some of them are inclined to think that Lolita has a moral value,while others insist that the novel has nothing but aesthetic value.It reflects,to some extent,that critics are prone to separate the moral value and the aesthetic value.Some researchers are aware that this problem will lead to a one-sided understanding of Nabokov's work and attempts to bridge the gap between the two aspacts.But from the present situation of criticism,this kind of research is still in the primary stage,and the understanding of the ethical dimension and the aesthetic dimension of the novel is not deep enough,and the understanding of the moral value of the work is too simplistic.On the basis of the close reading of the text and the method of ethic criticism,this thesis analyzes how Nabokov realizes his own unique morality which indicats that the moral value must rely on its aesthetic form,in Lolita by means of the irony as the pointcut.Irony has the characteristics of cheating,alienation,ambiguity and so on,which increases the difficulty of moral judgment.It forces the reader to continually transform his moral standpoint and to think deeply about ethical issues in the process.The first chapter analyzes Nabokov's unique morality and how the use of irony is related to his moral concept.Nabokov's comment on the moral value of Lolita seems a little contradictory.On the one hand,from the perspective of artistic autonomy,he argues that literature has its own value,and firmly denies any moral intention of his novels,in order to resist the practice of measuring literature on the basis of its moral value.On the other hand,Nabokov does not completely deny the moral connotations of literary works.This two seemingly contradictory aspects reflect Nabokov's view of the moral value of literature——literature is not a simple illustration of an abstract moral concept,on the contrary,it forces readers to rethink of the moral issues for a long time via a complex art form.Irony is an effective means of prolonging this confusion.By means of juxtaposing two contradictory meanings and concealing the author's moral attitude,irony increases the difficulty of readers' moral judgments.In this sense,irony will defamiliarize the process of moral judgments,which compels readers to rethink of the moral situation,and thus prolong the time of the reader's moral experience.In this case,it deepens the understanding of the moral dilemma which belongs to not only the characters but also hunman beings.The second chapter analyzes the difficulties of moral judgement caused by Hummbert Hummbert.There is a contradiction between the self-image that Hummbert intends to establish and the image that the reader builds through various clues in the novel.On the one hand,he expresses his love and passion for Lolita.On the other hand,he enslaves Lolita for his own lust,which eventually overturns his alleged love.Nabokov puts Hummbert as a gentle lover and tyrannical devil on the stage at the same time,which lead readers to the dilemma of moral judgments.The third chapter analyzes the relationship between the ironic structure and moral judgment.Lolita contains two texts with the same title,one is the text of Hummbert as the author,narrator and character,the other is the text of Nabokov which contains Hummbert's text.Although readers immerses themselves in a illusion of these two overlapping texts,they can not believe any of them.It indicates that when readers are tempted by Hummbert and sympathize him,Nabokov set up a number of details in a larger textual framework to challenge Hummbert's self-defense discourse.Readers have to adjust their moral position in the tension created by these two texts and take seriously account of the ethical problem posed by Nabokov without definitive answers.