Depiction In Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov

The art of depiction allows an author to craft a narration that would give the audience a first-hand experience of a situation. In this piece, the narrator is portraying the characteristics of her older sister, revealing an assortment of love alongside bitterness, through a forthright recitation of her own experiences.

A couple sentences into the piece, it is evident that the story is told through the point of view of a little girl – the speaker is unable to understand the situation from anyone else’s point of view. Even though the author never explicitly states the age of the speaker, it is easy to perceive her juvenile thought process. In fact, declaratory statements such as “I was clearly the better child” or “it was all a misunderstanding”

His controversial character Humbert asks for the audience’s “impartial sympathy” to be able to perceive helplessness of his actions. Similarly, this piece calls for the complete submission to the feelings of the little girl and potentially ignore the objective truth regarding the nature of her sister. Nabokov’s passage mainly describes Lolita’s physical features and their effects on Humbert. This passage takes a different route and mainly adheres to the inner effects resulting from the actions of the older sister. There are some implied metaphors, such as the sister having curly hair – generally characterized as very thick, stiff, and heavy – being analogous to her problematic and jumbled

The descriptions mostly focus on the speaker’s own feelings but it allows the author to display the self-reflective nature of a child. By illuminating the emotions of the speaker, the piece accentuates the actions and characteristics of the older sibling that prompted those reactions. Aggrieved, gullible claims, such as the unequal share of love by their parents, are suitable at a young age and are generally dissolved throughout the years of maturing. The child insists the hate is permanent; perhaps, the author is indicating the possible reconciliation of the characters in adulthood and thus, the stubborn narrative would only be possible through the younger version of the character. It is very evident that if anyone else, including the grown-up version of the child, decided to depict the same person, the characteristics would be completely different, plausibly more considerate and self-effacing. The type of writing present here is effective in establishing the tension between characters but would collapse if made to stand alone to an unknown audience and asked to paint an authentic picture of an