The Dangers of Fiction

In his essay, Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction, Matthew Winston discusses Lolita as a work of fiction, but still within it's own world. To be clear, Winston refers to Nabokov as the author only in the first and last sentences. Through out the rest of the essay, the author referred to is Humbert Humbert. This places Lolita firmly in the dangerous world of fiction. Winston's essay focuses mostly on Humbert as a narrator, and what this "autobiography" achieves. We are given glimpses of Humbert as narrator and we are asked whether or not to trust him. There is an end game to this book, from Humbert's point of view, and it is not really to prove his innocence. Winston tells us as much, as does Humbert, when in the third paragraph of the novel, he says "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." Winston says of the line: "the murderer, madman, and pedophile is balanced against the artistic creator, stylist, lover of language, and master of literary allusion," (421). But what is Humbert's true end game, then? It is an attempt at immortality. By writing Lolita, in this fictional world in which Humbert is more than a character, he forces these people, places, and events to live on forever, each time the story is reread. There is no way to know what is "true" and what's not in the story. Humbert is an untrustworthy narrator from the beginning. As Winston says, he has a "predilection for seeing his life through a veil of literature. To begin with, he tends to view himself as a character in a work of fiction," (423). We know as soon as he invokes Poe's Annabel Lee that he is probably not telling us the truth, and we know that he is attempting to fill the whole left by Annabel with Lolita. He thinks he's living in a fairy tale. And what stories last longer than fairy tales?