Abstract: Lolita is a masterpiece written by a renowned Russian-born American writer, Vladimir Nabokov and now valued as a classic of contemporary literature. It has been criticized mainly for its ambiguities of morality or authorial position.This thesis, based on Wayne C. Booth’s theory of rhetoric, is undertaken to analyze the narrative strategies of both the implied author and unreliable narrator. In doing so, the ambiguities of morality can be possibly clarified. This dissertation is composed of four parts. At the beginning, the author of this thesis will give a brief introduction to Vladimir Nabokov and his masterpiece Lolita. In the next part, an introduction and understanding of the intersubjective relationship from The Rhetoric of Fiction, including author and implied author, narrator and unreliable narrator, will be elaborated. What’s more, more attention will be paid to the correlation between the implied author and unreliable narrator. The following part will cover two aspects. The former is the unreliable narrator’s narrative strategies to arouse sympathy. The latter is the implied author’s intervention to dispel compassion and the implied author’s antagonistic standpoint is the very factor which leads to the intensive relation between the unreliable narrator and impled author. To sum up, this dissertation is supposed to lift the hypocritical mask of the unreliable narrator and, at the same time, to clarify the moral stance of the implied author so as to make it clear that Lolita is not a literary work which gives up moral judgments willingly but a complex one with multiple narrative effects. |
