Blog Post #8- Final Reflection

Lolita, written by Vladimir Novakov, is a novel about a man who calls himself Humbert Humbert, and has sexual feelings for a young girl named Dolores because she reminds him in many ways to his late young love, Annabelle. The unfortunate Humbert goes through many misfortunes in trying to have his Dolores, or Lolita, all to himself, and almost succeeds. Unfortunately, his Lolita grew up too fast for his liking, and once she realized the situation she had gotten into with H. H., left him and attempted to start a family of her own. In his obsessiveness over her, he murdered a man who also wanted her, though for different reasons, and eventually wound up in jail, from which he writes the journal from which we read.

Overall, I cannot say that I particularly like the novel Lolita. The language is rather dry at times and the subject matter, while important in many respects, was never my cup of tea, nor did I find that this novel was the best way to go about preaching the topic of sexualization of young girls in the first place. However, I did find that the characters were interesting enough to continue reading, just not very enthusiastically. I did have the great opportunity to look at the book through the critical reading lens of psychoanalytics, something which I do not often do consciously, but will likely begin to do now that I have read this novel. I certainly learned quite a few things about the recesses of this particular character's mind while reading this book, but I doubt that I learned much about myself. I was fairly aware of this topic beforehand, so it was not particularly eye opening by any means. There are uses to having and not having a lens, of which the first is that when reading with a lens, you find much more specific information that you would use, especially with the psychoanalytic lens, when going in depth about characterizations of characters. The opposite argument would be that when using a lens of any kind, one cannot simply relax and enjoy the book, but this is not entirely true. There are several different types of enjoyment, and using an analytic lens gives one the ability to enjoy speaking about a book in depth with others, which is enjoying a book on a very intellectual level. For example, I had a great time discussing the ramifications of Humbert's childhood on his current psyche within the books, which is something I might not have picked up on if I had simply read the book in the standard fashion. In the end, although Lolita is a beautifully crafted book and definitely interesting discussing about on a psychological level, I cannot say that it is necessarily a book that I am fond of.