Somebody Telling Somebody Else A Rhetorical Poetics Of Narrative

CHAPTER 5

Estranging Unreliability, Bonding

Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita

W

ITH THIS CHAPTER, I move away from discussions of probability

and begin a discussion of interrelations among authors, character

narrators, and audiences that will continue for the rest of the book—

sometimes as the main focus of a chapter and sometimes as a subsidiary focus.

These chapters build on work I have previously done, especially in Living to

Tell about It, a study of what the subtitle designates as “a rhetoric and ethics

of character narration,” and I will bring in aspects of that previous work as it

becomes relevant here. My overarching goal is to extend that work so that I

can offer something close to a comprehensive rhetorical poetics of character

narration, and I offer a sketch of the results in chapter 12. In this chapter, I

develop the general point that authors can and do use the same resources in

remarkably different ways in order to achieve different ends, by considering

the wide range of interpretive, affective, and ethical consequences that can fol-

low from unreliable narration. I start with the challenge of coming to terms

with the ethics of Lolita.

WAYNE C. BOOTH, UNRELIABLE NARRATION, AND THE

ETHICS OF LOLITA

Can we really be surprised that readers have overlooked Nabokov’s

ironies in Lolita, when Humbert Humbert is given full and unlimited

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