The Unreliable Narrator

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It's I think part of it is Nabokov's like command of the language. The prose in this book is very fun to read. Like he does things where it lapses into French and he uses um alleration. He writes in a way that's very engaging but on the other hand like I could especially in the earlier parts of the book I could read like a couple of chapters at a time before I literally had to put it down. It took me so long to get through it because Humbert Humbert is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita.

This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do you feel about him? How do we feel about him? How does he feel about him? The difficult subject matter is just one of the things that has earned Lolita its place in the literary canon.

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