The reliability of the narrators has been put into question within several of Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov’s use of words and his enchanting poetic ability has taken in many readers and sucked them into worlds void of clarity, direction, order, or reason. Nabokov’s style pushes against the conventional novel and contradicts the average reader’s assumptions of how a literary work should flow. Reading one of Nabokov’s works can become very frustrating and overwhelming if the reader comes in with preconceptions or tendencies on how a novel works. The unreliable narrator is a powerful literary device that Nabokov has harnessed to play with the reader. Within the texts of Lolita and Pale Fire, there are arguments about the credibility of the characters narratives. Both of these novels are told from the perspective of middle aged men, both of whom see the world through a slightly slanted lens. Their understanding of the world is both intriguing and eccentric, which allows the reader to become fascinated, but also makes the reader question where reality leaves off and fantasy begins. Understanding the unreliable narrator is crucial for dissecting the many layers that Nabokov injects into his writings.
When a narrator is unreliable there will be discrepancies between the presentation of the narrator and the overall flow of the novel. The narrator will often give subtle hints to his fabrication of a situation, by being vague or being inconsistent with the happenings around him. This type of narrator will often have an ulterior motive or agenda that the reader may be privy to, and this can help show the reader the biases that the narrator leans towards and how he deals with certain situations. The term unreliable narrator was coined by an American literary critic named Wayne C. Booth. Since the terms creation in his seminal study, The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961, it has become an important identification tool in literary studies. One of the major factors that are integrated into determining the unreliable narrator is the reader response and the cultural ideologies that accompany the reader. When examining a text, especially with Nabokov, it is completely up to the reader to decide what is sincere and what is construed by the narrator.
The novel Lolita is a good representation of how a narrator’s view point can construe how the reader feels about the text. In the case of Humbert Humbert, we have to view the world through his infatuated “nympholepsy” of a 12 year old girl. Though narrator voice is greatly confined through this viewpoint and greatly affects the attitude and quality of his narration, Humbert can only see Lolita through the ideal image that he has painted of her. Humbert’s Lolita is a completely abstract and surreal image of the real Delores Haze, a regular adolescent girl living in a grotesque and artificial reality. Humbert’s infatuation with Lolita follows a very strict and defined ideal that he has created in his mind. Humbert defines his boundaries as:
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched traveler... reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate "nymphets".... Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. (16-17)
Humbert discusses the characteristics in great detail of what it takes to be a nymphet. These characteristics are not based solely on the beauty or grace of the girl, but essence and mood that the girl portrays to Humbert himself. He points out that not all men will pick out the nymphet of a group “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy…” Humbert is completely engrossed by his ideal that he not only doesn’t see the real girl under his outline, but he is able to project his vision on to her, so that it blinds him of her true humanity. By making his girl into to a nymphet he is able to dehumanize her and justify his sexual urges for her. Humbert is able to justify all of his transgressions against Lolita, because he feels that Lolita is seducing him just as much. Humbert often concludes that he was mistaken to ever think that Lolita is innocent or devoid of any blame for his actions. The nymphet is a very seductive creature and entrances their victims into the state of desire that Humbert feels for Lolita. “Every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her body—the body of some immortal daemon disguised as a female child.” (139) Humbert allows himself to accept what he is doing to Lolita, because she has bewitched him with her nymphetic powers. With Humbert being within this entranced state, it is hard to know whether or not his recollection of the events is factual. He even questions his own morality several times early on in the story concluding: “I should have understood... that the nymphean, evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible and the delectation lethal.” (124-125)
Another situation in the novel that makes the reader question the reliability of the narrator is Humbert’s young romance with Annabel Leigh. Annabel was Humbert’s first romantic experience as a young child. They would both go down to the beach together during their parents social gatherings to study and explore each other. Annabel died the following summer and that was the last time that Humbert was acquainted an adolescent girl. This detachment and unfinished exploration into this world left Humbert with a void that was never filled. Since he was unable to make the connection with Annabel Leigh, he has ever since been looking for something to help him establish that connection.
“I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of if a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth… that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.” (14-15)
Humbert can no longer distinguish between the real girl that he loved in his youth and the girl that he has found to replace her. Lolita is merely an image, an artificial replication of what he once had and is forever lost. Within this mental state Humbert is able to free himself from the prison of one loss, by projecting Annabel into her modern counterpart, Lolita.
Humbert’s unreliability as a narrator can also be demonstrated in his inability to recollect information, but still give “accurate recollections” of events. Humbert considers himself to have a photographic memory, but often mixes up details within his recollections. When Humbert was living with Rita he had:
“Somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.” (263)
Humbert’s poetic ability persuades the reader to forgive his inability to recall this type of information and have the reader disregard the fact that what he says may be construed. For as the reader will realize, Humbert is no beginner when it comes to lying. When visiting with the Farlows, after the death of Charlotte, Humbert begins to create stories to show the affection that he had for Charlotte.
“I showed the kind and credulous Farlows… a little photograph of Charlotte I had found among her affairs… While on a business visit to the States, I had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met—and had a mad love affair. (100)
She communicates this information to her husband John who convinces him also of this story and Humbert is therefore able to avoid questions about Lolita. Additional situations include the deceitful way in which he married Charlotte in order to get to Lolita and the application of Lolita to a private school in Beardsley under the idea of being her father. Humbert is often inclined to deceive people in order to reach his goals.
Pale Fire is another text that defines the unreliable narrator. The book is based on a 999-line poem that is written by a deceased poet named John Shade. The poem was supposed to be a thousand lines, but a gunman that escaped from the psychiatric ward murdered him just before he was able to finish it. The foreword and commentary of the poem is written by a man named Charles Kinbote. The book wants to persuades the reader to believe that the commentary of the poem contains the real story. Nabokov creates two opposing characters with two different realities in which they live. Both men lived in New Wye, Appalachia and Kinbote was thought have lived in the kingdom of Zembla. Once again the major complexity of the novel arises in deciding where reality leaves off and fantasy begins. There are competing ideas on how the story is supposed to be read. Some believe that Zembla and even John Shade are merely figments of Kinbote’s imagination, while others believe that the commentary of Zembla is real and are frustrated at the quality and content of Shade’s poem. Pale Fire leaves plenty of room for interpretation, which makes a close reading of the book difficult.
Before deciding how to approach the novel, the reader must first decide how much of Kinbote’s narrative he will believe and the role played by unreliable narration. From the foreword the reader understands that Kinbote is completely infatuated with John Shade.
“I experienced a grand sense of wonder every time I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling what I felt… of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence.” (27)
Kinbote reveals to the reader exactly how much he obsesses over Shade not only when he details spying on the poet’s windows every night, but especially when he observes the light flicking on in the bedroom window and remarks that “according to my deductions, only two nights had passed since the three-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-ninth time—but no matter.” (157).
Kinbote considers himself John’s only true friend, but the reader can see otherwise from the text. John and Sybil avoid Kinbote as much as possible, but John’s sincerity gets the best of him and is usually more than polite to Kinbote and entertains his conversations.
Kinbote recounts in his index the work of a V. Botkin, a Russian-bred American scholar that studies the maggot of an extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end” (306). There are distinct similarities between Vladimir Nabokov and V. Botkin; Nabokov studied butterflies; Botkin merely studied flies. Moreover, the reader discovers that the Zemblan word for regicide is “Kinbote,” an indication that while Gradus (Jack Grey) allegedly hunts a Zemblan king, Kinbote engages in a different kind of regicide, namely that of John Shade and his prose (257).
These texts very gracefully show the power of the unreliable narrator. Humbert Humbert and Kinbote both exhibit a mastery of illusion and deception, So much that the moderate reader often sides with them undeniably. This type of narration challenges the reader to look beyond what is being portrayed in the text and has them read between the lines to find a new, hidden, or multiple meanings that the author may or may not have meant to leave there. These texts illustrate the deception that goes on in our culture today, makes us all a little bit more self aware and leaves us thankful for the journey.
