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Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, is a highly aesthetic writer. Most of his work shows an amazing interest in and talent for language. He deceptively uses language in Lolita to mask and make the forbidden divine. Contextually, Lolita may be viewed as a novel about explicit sexual desire. However, it is the illicit desire of a stepfather for his 12-year old stepdaughter. The novel’s subject inevitably conjures up expectations of pornography, but there in not a single obscene term in Lolita. Nabokov portrays erotic scenes and sensual images with a poetic sensibility that belies the underlying meaning of the words. The beautiful manipulation of language coerces one to understand Humbert’s interdict act of pedophilia. By combining erotic and poetic desire in the context of the forbidden, Nabokov challenges the immorality of pornography, as illicit desire becomes masked in sensuous language. Nabokov carefully tailors the language Humbert Humbert uses to tell the world of his love for the forbidden nymphet, urging sympathy and innocence from the reader. However, the deeper meaning of the forbidden sexual desire is clearly seen in the use of only slightly veiled metaphor alluding to Humbert's own obsession. The very first words of the novel set the stage for Nabokov's masterful use of poetic and erotic allusion. The poetic and romantic lyricism become the foundation for allusion from the deviancy of Humbert’s sexual desires: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita". From the first, he juxtaposes the ordinary with the sexual in his descri...

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