IN THE REFUGE OF ART: THE IRRESISTIBLE UNRELIABILITY OF NABOKOV'S NARRATORS

The two novels by Vladimir Nabokov treated in this paper - Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962) - are among most famous and most successfully shaped examples of the employment of the unreliable narrator in the 20th century fiction. The author exploits numerous contradictions of this complex and often controversial narrative strategy, pointing towards its esthetic, semantic and ethical potentials. Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote are seductive and multi-talented narrators-characters, whose imagination, verbal gift and irresistibly attractive rhetoric overshadow their moral and psychological flaws, whereas the formal beauty of their narration prevails over the disturbing content of their stories. However, comparing their authentic although socially unacceptable passion and poetry with the hypocrisy of the social system that condemns them, Nabokov questions the conventional morality and the well-established black-and-white judgment to which we often resort. Since the word "reality" turns out to be something too easily relativised, the unreliability of these narrators is redeemed, not only by the beauty of their style, but by the honesty with which they esthetically shape their deepest experience. Even though Nabokov has often been identified with his narrators, mainly due to the faith in the supremacy of art over life they share, there are "points" in the texts of these novels which clearly point to the fact that despite the strong resemblance between their esthetic preoccupations, their ethical positions are different. The artistic accomplishment of the author of Lolita and Pale Fire is measured exactly by the degree of his, as well as our understanding and compassion for his problematic, unreliable and in a way tragic narrators, whose only sanctuary and the rule of conduct is art and whose upsetting stories have the power to transform both them and the readers.