Books where protagonist is the most morally vile character

[Rippounet]

53 minutes ago, john said:

You don’t think the necessity of a teacher, a reference manual and years of contemplation indicate that this aspect of the novel isn’t that well developed?

In my very first class about Lolita, the teacher asked us who had managed to read it without taking a -significant- break.
About half of us had, in fact, had to take a long pause in our reading, most of us at the end of the first part.

Lolita is a test. Some people pass on their first try, some people on their second. And then, some people keep trying to blame the author for his narrator (tbh, I darkly suspect these are the people who failed the test in the first place).
Your saying that "Nabokov fails to delve into the inner life of Dolores" makes no sense at all. That he doesn't is the very reason why the book can be seen as a test, it's the project. As a reader, you're meant to see beyond the narrator's bullshit and understand what the story really is. If you're quick, the last sentence of the first part is unbearable.

[john]

On 1/5/2022 at 5:45 PM, Rippounet said:

In my very first class about Lolita, the teacher asked us who had managed to read it without taking a -significant- break.
About half of us had, in fact, had to take a long pause in our reading, most of us at the end of the first part.

Lolita is a test. Some people pass on their first try, some people on their second. And then, some people keep trying to blame the author for his narrator (tbh, I darkly suspect these are the people who failed the test in the first place).
Your saying that "Nabokov fails to delve into the inner life of Dolores" makes no sense at all. That he doesn't is the very reason why the book can be seen as a test, it's the project. As a reader, you're meant to see beyond the narrator's bullshit and understand what the story really is. If you're quick, the last sentence of the first part is unbearable.

All right, let’s try it a different way. Do you think the musings of a victimiser for his victim is efficient characterisation of that victim? You appear to, since you suggest that this is a way the book takes victimhood into account. I don’t think so, the book fails on that.

But blame has nothing to do with it. Who’s blaming the author? His ‘project’ is entirely successful. It’s an excellent novel. But it’s a novel that can be legitimately read as the story of a child who outwits and makes miserable a feeble adult.

Finally, the book is not a test for the reader. No novel is. It’s an exercise in skill for Nabokov, that’s true, but ultimately it’s a cynical comedy that was known as sensationalist fiction for years before its literary qualities were picked up on. The idea that he intended people to read through acute discomfort to gain enlightenment is nonsense and the worst kind of approach to literature.

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, john said:

His ‘project’ is entirely successful. It’s an excellent novel. But it’s a novel that can be legitimately read as the story of a child who outwits and makes miserable a feeble adult.

Nope, it absolutely can't. The facts told in the book just don't allow for that reading. That's precisely what people have been trying to tell you. And tbh, we were trying to be nice with you.

Because anyone reading Lolita that way has a problem. Maybe they haven't paid attention, maybe they have poor reading skills, or maybe they wanted to read it that way in the first place.

3 hours ago, john said:

Finally, the book is not a test for the reader. No novel is.[...]The idea that he intended people to read through acute discomfort to gain enlightenment is nonsense and the worst kind of approach to literature.

Well, ok, since you seem to know better than everyone (including my lit teacher and the dozens of scholarly articles they had me read), I guess we'll just have to bow to your expertise, uh?

*sigh*

It's not clear that the book was meant as a test by Nabokov, not exactly. But Nabokov sought to reaffirm the power of the author over the reader ; he hated the idea that the "author was dead," and that it was now all about reception (Barthes would be the one to formalise the "death of the author"). So he wrote these extremely elaborate stories as a demonstration of his abilities.
And of course, Lolita is the most famous of these, because it's the story of a monster trying to convince the reader that he is not a monster. You did notice that the narrator addresses the reader several times, right? That the reader is meant to be a "jury" judging the case of HH? That's the project. If you think that the story can be read as "the story of a child who outwits and makes miserable a feeble adult," the narrator wins. If you see through the bullshit and realize the atrocity of his crimes (by focusing on the facts and ignoring HH's pathetic excuses), the narrator loses. It's pretty much written right there on the page, from the very first pages in the fake "foreword." But the hidden warning in the foreword is easy to miss, or to dismiss.

The fun thing is that, inadvertently or not (we can't be 100% sure), Nabokov did build a trap. Because anyone who fails to see the facts beyond the prose will end up defending HH and blaming Lolita for his crimes, which will expose them to being accused of being a pedophile themselves! And that's more or less what happened to you on the previous page.
So now it is becoming funny because you persist. You keep wanting to defend your reading (which may or may not be shared with some critics), and saying that it is Nabokov who failed. Even though talking about Lolita's "wiles and promiscuity" means Nabokov's narrator has in fact won you over, which in turn means that Nabokov's project is a success.
Don't you see the irony? The more you insist that Nabokov has failed, and the more you prove that he succeeded. And at some point, if you keep insisting, people will wonder why it is that you want to defend... Humbert Humbert. If you needed Lolita to be characterized as a victim so badly, either your reading skills are really bad, either you are... a pedophile.

And that's why Lolita is one of the most amazing pieces of litterature ever. Whether by design or not, it's a test to see whether readers are cleverer or not that the narrator, and by extension, Nabokov. And every single person who, like you, gets it wrong, shows that the author is, in fact, not dead.
The reason I told you that you didn't want to insist, is because any male who fails to see through HH's bullshit might become suspect in the eyes of the people who did. That's how good Nabokov was.

[john]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Nope, it absolutely can't. The facts told in the book just don't allow for that reading. That's precisely what people have been trying to tell you. And tbh, we were trying to be nice with you.

Well, you’ve understood the nature of the argument over the course of three posts, I suppose.

But you’re all over the place. First the victim’s voice is there but you need a teacher and a good bibliography to find it. Then it isn’t there because that was Nabakov’s project (I agree with this one) and now that the project (by which you mean the way the novel was written as Humbert’s purely solipsistic account) demands only one interpretation (which is impossible on the face of it).

But if you think lamenting the lack of a voice for a victim in a novel about a paedophile renders one a paedophile then I think you need yet another course correction.

And this has nothing to do with Nabokov, I don’t think he failed, he wrote exactly the novel he wanted to write. I don’t know who you imagine is reading Lolita as a merry jaunt for an abusive kidnapper and his victim but the notion that the book functions as an inadvertent trap and that the reader has to be ‘cleverer than Nabokov’ to see Humbert as a monster is more pompous nonsense.

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Well, ok, since you seem to know better than everyone (including my lit teacher and the dozens of scholarly articles they had me read), I guess we'll just have to bow to your expertise, uh?

This is a little rich coming from the guy who came in and told everybody he was the alpha Lolita scholar because he once had a teacher and a good bibliography. It might not occur to you for some reason but I also had a literature teacher. And she didn’t teach me that literature is a test, she taught me that it’s enjoyable.

[Ran]

Lets try to keep it civil, folks.

[john]

15 hours ago, Rippounet said:

And that's why Lolita is one of the most amazing pieces of litterature ever. Whether by design or not, it's a test to see whether readers are cleverer or not that the narrator, and by extension, Nabokov. And every single person who, like you, gets it wrong, shows that the author is, in fact, not dead.

By the way, you’ve got the whole conception of the narrative device used wrong as well.

Nabokov isn’t setting out to fool us through his narrator. He’s setting out to charm us. That’s the death of the author that you’re trying to hammer into the wrong sized hole here - the divorce between the elegant, aesthetically pleasing language and the underlying meaning of the words used. Humbert is a wordsmith not a liar.

Really, your whole performance in this thread, from your declaration that you know the book so well that there’s no point arguing with you to your likening literary criticism to paedophilia, is a litany of you tripping over your own dick while enthusiastically waving it around.

[Annara Snow]

I read Lolita just once for the university and hadn't talked to any lit teacher or read any criticism, and my immediate response was that Humbert Humbert was a pathetic self-justifying pedophile child abuser full of s*** trying to convince himself (and his imaginary audience) thar he was not the monster he was, and that Dolores was un unlucky 12 year old kid whose life he ruined. 

In fact, my only previous knowledge of Lolita was from the pop culture imagery derived from shots from the Kubrick movie, and while/after reading the book, my reaction was to conclude this popular image was total BS and to wonder why the pop culture has sexualized Dolores so much and why it keeps creating this idea that it is a sexy book about an 18-19 year old femme fatale seducing an older guy. There is probably no other book with such a huge gap between what it really is and what the pop culture represents it as.

Maybe this is what interferes with some readers' interpretation? Or maybe there were some who fell too much with Humbert's narration and ended up creating this weird idea, together with casting choices that were deemed more palatable to the public/the censors?

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

In fact, my only previous knowledge of Lolita was from the pop culture imagery derived from shots from the Kubrick movie, and while/after reading the book, my reaction was to conclude this popular image was total BS and to wonder why the pop culture has sexualized Dolores so much and why it keeps creating this idea that it is a sexy book about an 18-19 year old femme fatale seducing an older guy. There is probably no other book with such a huge gap between what it really is and what the pop culture represents it as.

Aye. Kubrick royally screwed up on this one, by apparently taking HH's story at face value. His movie's success made "Lolita" into something she was never meant to be.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Aye. Kubrick royally screwed up on this one, by apparently taking HH's story at face value. His movie's success made "Lolita" into something she was never meant to be

That's always the problem with film and tv -- or as someone very brilliant has observed, "Movies told me lies, music told me the truth."  And the screen version always replaces the original in the minds even of those who know the original first.  Most of us old enough have seen this occur in real time with Lord Of the Rings, for instance.

Back when Kubrick planned the film, there was a lot of push back from the studios against doing it.  Even then, even those toxic evile and often child-preferring gents feared putting a guy on screen who was effing a pre-pubescent was too much for US audience -- Hollywood was still run by the conditions of the Hayes Code. By the regulations of this Hollywood production code, the story was out of bounds. So the compromise was to have a barely (14 years old) adolescent play Lolita. 

The casting, like everything else about the film, was an ongoing media sensation.  If one goes back into the archives, looking at magazines such as Look, for one instance, the actress, Sue Lyon, was pictured, even as herself, not in character, or movie stills yet, in sexy come-hither poses and situations.  From the beginning the media refused to differentiate between Sue Lyon and Lolita, much less the novel Lolita and the screen Lolita.  Just as today, many a poor reader and movie watcher can't distinguish either.

By the way a competent literature teacher, teaches a great deal more about the books on the syllabus beyond, 'reading is fun."

 

 

[john]

@Rippounet Yeah, I read that before you edited. It’s funny how you’re so good at reading Lolita (in your own mind) and so bad at reading posts on a message board. Literally nothing you ascribe to me is true or evidenced by any of my posts here.

Its difficult to know how much of Lolita I agree with you on since you seem to eschew argument in favour of supercilious statements about your own intelligence. But you’re right on the Kubrick film, that did the character even more of a disservice than the book, although the Lolita trope already existed. Of course Nabokov wrote the screenplay too but it was rewritten by Kubrick so we’ll never know what it would have been.

[john]

9 minutes ago, Zorral said:

By the way a competent literature teacher, teaches a great deal more about the books on the syllabus beyond, 'reading is fun."

I see you’ve abandoned the much more pretentious term ‘responsible’ as your descriptor of a literature teacher. Do the words ‘enjoyable’ and ‘fun’ mean the same thing to you?

[polishgenius]

On 1/7/2022 at 2:31 PM, john said:

Finally, the book is not a test for the reader. No novel is.

I've got no comments on the specifics of the argument because I haven't read Lolita and aren't going to, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim that no novel has ever been designed with no testing of the reader in mind. Whether it's Finnegans Wake challenging you just to understand the language or Book of the New Sun challenging you to follow the story while the narrator ignores, forgets, lies about or just doesn't understand huge chunks of it, to books that are intended to throw up moral challenges or make readers question preconceptions. I can't say if Lolita is or isn't, or if Rippounet's arguments hold up, but just dismissing it as such because novels can't be is an argument on wobbly ground tbqh. 

[Zorral]

53 minutes ago, john said:

I see you’ve abandoned the much more pretentious term ‘responsible’ as your descriptor of a literature teacher. Do the words ‘enjoyable’ and ‘fun’ mean the same thing to you?

As you know bhob, they can mean the same or they can mean different things, depending on context. Sheesh, these days fun is also now also an adjective instead of an adverb.    Also incompetent and irresponsible are frequently one and the same, right?  Let's have fun instead of me working to teach somebody something worthwhile.  Have had to deal with the consequences of that in the classroom and elsewhere too far more often than I should have to.

You're gonna keep diggin' that hole deeper, so 

[Ran]

I really don't think Nabokov was writing Lolita as a "test" for anyone. He repeatedly expressed that for him the characters and the story all existed to give "aesthetic bliss", that there was "no moral in tow" intended because moralizing and didactism were anathema to him.

Hard to square his view of a purely aesthetic effort -- one which, notably, he claimed far too many critics missed to focus instead on the alleged morality or immorality of his text -- with his intending to test anyone.

Personally I think people are projecting very hard on an imagined author. 

[john]

21 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I've got no comments on the specifics of the argument because I haven't read Lolita and aren't going to, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim that no novel has ever been designed with no testing of the reader in mind. Whether it's Finnegans Wake challenging you just to understand the language or Book of the New Sun challenging you to follow the story while the narrator ignores, forgets, lies about or just doesn't understand huge chunks of it, to books that are intended to throw up moral challenges or make readers question preconceptions. I can't say if Lolita is or isn't, or if Rippounet's arguments hold up, but just dismissing it as such because novels can't be is an argument on wobbly ground tbqh. 

A challenge is different from a test, I would say. You can’t fail a challenge and you derive enjoyment (yes, enjoyment!) from the effort regardless. In the context Ripp meant it (he also used the phrases ‘inadvertent trap’ and ‘have to be cleverer than the author’ and implied that if you fail this particular test you’re a pedophile, this in a book which is frankly much less opaque than Book of the New Sun, btw) I don’t believe in this author vs reader mentality.

9 minutes ago, Zorral said:

????????

As you know bhob, they can mean the same or they can mean different things, depending on context. Sheesh, these days fun is also now also an adjective instead of an adverb.    Also incompetent and irresponsible are frequently one and the same, right?  Let's have fun instead of me working to teach somebody something worthwhile.  Have had to deal with the consequences of that in the classroom and elsewhere too far more often than I should have to.

Teaching something worthwhile is a little different from requiring them to suffer through some kind of test of their own worth.

[Rippounet]

44 minutes ago, john said:

In the context Ripp meant it (he also used the phrases ‘inadvertent trap’ and ‘have to be cleverer than the author’ and implied that if you fail this particular test you’re a pedophile,

My exact words were "cleverer than the narrator, and by extension, Nabokov." I shouldn't have added the last four words.
I don't think Nabokov exactly meant the book as a test, but I do believe it ended up being one, inadvertently, yes, because so many people failed to see that, beyond HH's narration (and even within it at times), Lolita was always the victim.

I personally think the reader's realization of HH's monstruosity is meant to be gradual. You are correct that this is about charm, with the narrator seeking to seduce the reader, to hide his guilt. But the text also has many clues to ensure the reader never completely falls for it (BTW I didn't say you needed a teacher and a bibliography to find them, but to find them all). And while we could argue about the first part, the second part of the book makes it crystal clear that we are reading a story of horrific abuse.

Hence why I objected (in the strongest possible terms) to the reading of Lolita as a "villain" who seduces the narrator. She can only be described that way within HH's narrative (and maybe even only within the first part of that narrative), which the reader is not supposed to (cannot decently) take at face value. HH himself makes it clear here and there that he knows that he is really a monster (a "pentapod monster"), and that his defense is spurious (as the foreword warns) ; it should progressively become ovious to the reader that he is not arguing "in good faith." The basic facts of the story are enough to show she is a victim (I mean, she's 12...). There are clues that HH's narrative is often false (the last few chapters may even never have "happened", the chronology is fuzzy) and that he cannot be trusted. And, of course, Lolita herself, within HH's narrative, says she was raped.
Most importantly, Nabokov himself answered that question, in unambiguous terms, in a rather famous 1975 interview, that can be found on youtube. Nabokov starts explaining at the 43:42 mark:
"Lolita is not a perverse young girl. She's a poor child who is debauched, and whose senses never awaken under the caresses of the foul mister Humbert. [...] It is interesting to wonder, as the journalists say, about the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet, that I invented in (19)55, has undergone in the mind of the public. [...] Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical aspect, her age, everything was modified in foreign publications."
Apologies for the poor translation (I'm sure a better one is available somewhere). The youtube link above is relatively incomplete, you can hear the last sentence here. BTW, Nabokov also referred to Lolita as a "poor child" (une pauvre enfant) in this 1959 interview , saying ""by the end of the book, both the reader and the author pity her, this poor child sacrificed on the altars of motels."

The heart of the matter is that you wrote a number of things that were undisputably wrong, because you failed to understand just how unreliable and vile the narrator of Lolita is and didn't see the actual story, which you dismissed as "plot points." The foreword describes our narrator as a "shining example of moral leprosy." HH is a sociopath, and he absolutely is "a man struggling with the consequences of evil acts." No, she does not set out to hurt him (she's just a kid who grew up without a father figure, what she really wants is fatherly affection), nor can it be said that she ruins his life, he's the one who ruins both of their lives. How many quotes do you need? Humbert Humbert admitting that "there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it" ? Humbert Humbert admitting that he has "disregarded all laws of humanity" ? The fact that he huggs her and apologizes after everytime he rapes her? That she says "oh, no" when his erection comes back? That he's perfectly aware that she wants money to escape him, that then "she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state" ?
And how about every single time he admits his guilt? When he says " in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child names Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven" or at the end "What I heard was but the melody of children at play, [...], and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”
Is this not a man "struggling with the consequences of evil acts" to you?
How about the quote (which gave nausea to one of my female classmates) where he fantasizes about having a girl with Lolita, that he could then rape, until he had a granddaughter to rape in turn?
How many quotes would it take for you to admit you just missed them and read the book wrong?
Yes, it's true Nabokov didn't give Lolita "a voice" to speak of within his book, but he still made it clear she was the victim, that her "deviousness and cruelty" were the lies of a foul, despicable man. And as I said, maybe it's not easy for everyone to see them as lies on a first read (obviously, many people did make that same mistake). But there's a magic solution here: you re-read the fucking book. Instead of insisting that your reading is "legitimate," you act like an adult and you re-read the book, paying attention to everything you missed the first time. FFS.
 

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 hours ago, john said:

A challenge is different from a test, I would say. You can’t fail a challenge and you derive enjoyment (yes, enjoyment!) from the effort regardless. In the context Ripp meant it (he also used the phrases ‘inadvertent trap’ and ‘have to be cleverer than the author’ and implied that if you fail this particular test you’re a pedophile, this in a book which is frankly much less opaque than Book of the New Sun, btw) I don’t believe in this author vs reader mentality.

Teaching something worthwhile is a little different from requiring them to suffer through some kind of test of their own worth.

For what it's worth I'm pretty sure Garcia Marquez described reading Love in the Time of Cholera as something "to be careful to avoid my traps".  I think you can read, appreciate, and enjoy all sorts of fiction while completely missing subtlety, irony, etc.

Obviously a different novel, and I think it's slightly easier to miss how horrible Florentine Ariza is than HH.  But trap/trick/challenge/puzzle... It's all in the same ballpark.  

Now if you're all in on death of the author this is all largely irrelevant.  

 

[john]

@Rippounet I’m glad you decided to take my advice and constructed an argument. I’m not going to go through all that, I can’t be bothered and, crucially, I already know it. And so does every other reader or at least the vast majority of them. It’s really not as difficult as you make out.

My raising the idea of Lolita as a villain was, as I said in my initial post, an interpretation based on the problematic way the character is treated (or could be said to be treated, if you like). I didn’t say it was the only interpretation, the likely interpretation, a common interpretation, or even (gasp) my own interpretation. But it’s an interpretation allowed for by the way the book is written. I know you don’t agree, that’s fine, that’s an argument.

All my uses of these apparently terribly objectionable terms were discussing the character in the context of this interpretation. And like I said, I didn’t make this up, this is something people debate around Lolita.

Why you think my bringing up this one part of an enormous, decades long scholarly debate means I am ignorant of other interpretations (including your own definitive interpretation), or prefer Lolita as a villain over Humbert, or failed to notice his horrific crimes (I don’t even see how that’s possible but whatever), I can’t imagine. I don’t think I need to reread the book, I honestly know it well and I’ll possibly argue about it differently another time it comes up.

[Rippounet]

7 minutes ago, john said:

I didn’t say it was the only interpretation, the likely interpretation, a common interpretation, or even (gasp) my own interpretation.

Oh, no, you absolutely did write such things. You absolutely did write that this was a "common reaction to Lolita." You absolutely did tell Annara Snow she didn't "understand the concept of fiction." You tried to use a "multitude of literary criticism that says the same thing, that there isn’t much there." You totally wrote "we can certainly reject Humbert’s interpretation but there isn’t much to put in its place."
This exchange started tuesday. You had days to make it clear you were not defending your interpretation, days to acknowledge that "my" interpretation (which is also the author's, and apparently that of most people here) was more than valid. Instead, you chose to attack me for making "supercilious statements about [my] own intelligence," describing my "performance" as "a litany of [my] tripping over [my] own dick while enthusiastically waving it around."

I think you're only changing your tune because at some point you did realize the argument that "this aspect of the novel isn’t that well developed," that Nabokov only let "slip Humbert’s narrative leash a few times," or that "Lolita’s victimhood is barely taken into account" was not that easy to defend after all, that the unreliable narrator was in fact not "used almost exclusively to comedically highlight Humbert’s pathetic and pitiful nature" but that this was, in fact, the trap that readers of Lolita can fall into.

I'll give you one thing: it is quite odd to write a book whose despicable narrator tries to convince the reader to condone his pedophilia. Why assert the power of litterature in such a way? Sure, he always claimed that there was no "moralizing" dimension to the book, but, like many others, I can't help think of the "real life Humbert Humbert" that became famous in the decades following the publication of Lolita. It has been said that Nabokov's inspiration for HH was someone called Frank La Salle, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Nabokov was also mocking... the French.

41 minutes ago, john said:

It’s really not as difficult as you make out.

On that we actually agree.

[john]

8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Oh, no, you absolutely did write such things. You absolutely did write that this was a "common reaction to Lolita." You absolutely did tell Annara Snow she didn't "understand the concept of fiction." You tried to use a "multitude of literary criticism that says the same thing, that there isn’t much there." You totally wrote "we can certainly reject Humbert’s interpretation but there isn’t much to put in its place."
This exchange started tuesday. You had days to make it clear you were not defending your interpretation, days to acknowledge that "my" interpretation (which is also the author's, and apparently that of most people here) was more than valid. Instead, you chose to attack me for making "supercilious statements about [my] own intelligence," describing my "performance" as "a litany of [my] tripping over [my] own dick while enthusiastically waving it around."

No, no, no no. I’m not going back on any of these assertions. That stands apart from an acknowledgment of what should be obvious, that literature is an interpretative subject matter and an a writer can be flawed in one aspect of his creation. These quotes of mine are relating to the question of whether Nabokov established a voice for his victim, that’s the lack that is a common criticism among reviewers and readers. And we settled this, ‘that’s the project’, remember? If you’re now going back to your first argument, that it’s there but it can be difficult to see, that’s fine but I already countered one of your initial examples (He broke my heart, you only broke my life) and got nothing back.

I’m aware you don’t like to answer direct questions but let me try another -when you finished Lolita, when you passed the test and saw what so few could see, that a blatant portrait of a paedophile was in fact a blatant portrait of a paedophile, what did you think about Dolores? What did you imagine about her thoughts and feelings? And what did you base those imagines on? I can only imagine her, strictly based on what I get from the book, as an amorphous blob on which one can assign any motivations or character traits. That’s why the villain interpretation, while not a likely interpretation, is a valid interpretation. It’s about that as much as it’s about anything, was exactly what I said in my initial post. This doesn’t suggest for a moment that this conception somehow leaves you in support of the narrator. It’s not even a question of going through the book and picking out examples, and it’s absolutely not, I can’t stress enough how absurd the notion is, avoiding triggering a metaphysical trap. It’s an effect arising from the way the book is composed, one that Nabokov didn’t care about, if he even considered it at all.

And I was defending my initial post, I don’t generally comment on my broader interpretation of something, or acknowledge that the person I’m arguing with has a valid interpretation (apparently only up to a point, I guess being ludicrously accused of being a paedophile might trigger that). But it makes no difference to the argument so why would I? What’s the point of that? I still think I’m right and your wrong. You still have the same objections to me even conceiving of such an interpretation. And the timescale makes no difference, I made that post months ago. It’s the same defence regardless of when the objection comes.

Ok, saying Annara Snow ‘obviously didn’t understand the concept of fiction’ was uncalled for. I was responding to her saying I ‘obviously didn’t understand the concept of the unreliable narrator.’ You won’t appreciate this because you are a poster who is typically condescending and dismissive of those he’s arguing with right from the off, but it’s normal to respond to unnecessary obnoxiousness with more unnecessary obnoxiousness. At least for me, I’m sure more mature and level headed people can contain themselves.

8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

On that we actually agree.

This seems more of a change of tune than anything I said. So you’re now saying this test is easy? Why didn’t Nabokov construct a more difficult test to really nail all those secret paedophiles?

I do wonder about that literature class you took. What was the final exam - Paedophilia is bad. Paedophile characters are bad, even when they tell you they’re good. Discuss.