America in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita Research Paper

America in Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita - Research Paper ExampleSo much of the consumer society must perk up been a shock to him, after the deprivations of wartime in Europe, and yet he identified very strongly with many features of his new home. Sweeney quotes Nabokov saying to a journalist in 1966 I am as American as April in Arizona (1994, p. 325) and links this curious alliterative statement with the period when Nabokov and his family lived in Arizona in the Spring of 1953 On sunny afternoons that April (and all day long during one rainy week) Nabokov worked at telling one story in particular Lolita, his approximately acute observation of Americas beauties and vulgarities, the most cunning, incisive and poetic American novel of this century. (Sweeney, 1994, p. 328).Lolita is set in working class provincial America, and its characters verbalise the idiom of that milieu. The object of his desire is a world weary twelve year old and Humbert indulges her love of vulgar and transient a spects of American culture Mentally, I found her a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth. (Nabokov and Appel, 1991, p. 148)The character of Humbert is portrayed as an immigrant of French origins, and in this character Nabokov plays out part of himself, quoting the narrative style of the realist novelist Flaubert in French with the phrase Nous connmes and contrasting this learned summon with the tacky motels that they visit (Nabokov and Appel, 1991, pp. 145-146). He sees the tackiness that is on offer as something faintly ridiculous, but uses it as a means to ingratiate himself with Lolita we had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words novelties and souvenirs simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt (Nabokov and Appel, p. 148). Humbert merges his own intellectual delight in the language with Lolitas love of trivia. done her he learns to both love and hate