Title The architect of illusion: bad faith and narrative strategies in vladimir nabokov’s “lolita”
Translation of Title Iliuzijos architektas: blogas tikėjimas (‘bad faith’) ir pasakojimo strategijos Vladimiro Nabokovo romane „Lolita“.
Authors Huynh, Colby Austin
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Pages 41
Keywords [eng] Lolita, bad faith, self-deception, responsibility, rhetorical narratology, narrative strategies, implied author, authorial silence Lolita, nesąžiningumas, saviapgaulė, atsakomybė, retorinė naratologija, naratyvinės strategijos, numanomas autorius, autorinė tyla
Abstract [eng] This paper examines the relationship between self-deception and narrative persuasion in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita through the combined frameworks of 20th-century existential philosophy and rhetorical narratology. While scholars have extensively discussed the novel’s engagement with aestheticism, morality, unreliable narration, and more, less attention has been given to how all of these themes converge within the work to productively lend themselves to a Sartrean existential reading, particularly in relation to the concept of “bad faith” and the denial of one’s own radical freedom and avoidance of responsibility. Drawing from theories of both Jean-Paul Sartre and Wayne C. Booth, this analysis argues that the protagonist and narrator of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, constructs and sustains a false perception of reality through acts of bad faith, specific to the various forms explained in Sartre’s seminal work, Being and Nothingness (1943). Furthermore, this study shows how Humbert, as a dramatized narrator, attempts to rhetorically impose this view of reality onto the reader using various narrative strategies discussed in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Ultimately, too, it is revealed how these strategies fail, for Booth’s concept of the “implied author” illuminates how Nabokov’s authorial silence—constitutive of the novel’s design—produces its own rhetorical effects that subtly guide the reader away from Humbert’s manipulative pull. This study thereby positions Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as a demonstration of how bad faith can be performed and distributed through narration, rendering the work as not only a bad faith narrative but also an exemplary piece of rhetorical engineering.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Master thesis
Language English
Publication date 2026