Dreaming with Lolita

1726 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Research on the importance of fairytales for young children

Dreaming with Lolita

What world are you living in? Over the past hundreds of years psychologists have been studying the functions of the human mind. It is a task that seems to prolong as information and new methods arrive. What makes us dream or imagine things? The fact that we have dreams and ambitions in life strives us to believe through imagining and dreaming that we will eventually get a break in life. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, is a novel that characterizes these types of situations. It implies similarity in plot and theme between Lolita and certain fairy tales. Furthermore, Nabokov implies the folk characterization in Lolita to show the paradoxical relationship of art and reality thus showing how real life people live out the lives of fictional fairy tales. It is also evident that because of the folkloristic material portrayed in Lolita, it is seen that man lives between two worlds, the imagined one and the true one. The image of Lolita had such effect on society in the way that pre pubescent children wanted to be like her, they wanted to be as pretty as her and wear those heart shaped sunglasses like her thus living in a world of fantasy. Even today's society still has, more then ever that Lolita syndrome thus causing a lot of pre pubescent kids to live in a fantasy world instead of the real one.

Nabokov shows all throughout the novel the strong parallel between real life characters and folk characters. The four main characters in the novel all play an have their own folkloristic roles in the novel. For example, Charlotte Haze, which is Lolita's mother, is portrayed in the novel as the, "jealous mother who is so frequently the villain in folk tales such as "Cinderella" and "Snow White" (Jones 69). All through out...

... middle of paper ...

...gative things can occur. For example, you can tarnish a kids self esteem (Marks 71).

The Lolita syndrome also deals with the fact that any new or material good that comes out on the market; the Lolita syndrome will "change everything it touches into a new and infinitely flexible form" (Marks 71). This transcends anything because people want to be like Loita. If she wears heart shaped sunglasses then so do pre pubescent and adolescent kids who fantasize being her and the only way their fantasy can become remotely a reality is by buying these items.

Man lives in two different worlds. It is evident that through Lolita it is shown how real life characters can live out the lives of folk characters. Are we living in a fantasized world then? The truth of the matter is that we live in an imperfect world. We need to get that through our heads. What world do you live in?

Show More
Related

  • Family Support In The Outsiders

    610 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Outsiders, an enthralling novel by S.E Hinton, is an excellent story about the hardships and triumphs experienced by the Greasers and the Socs two rival gangs. S.E Hinton tells a thrilling tale about the Socs and the Greasers that are two gangs and she characterize how they live. Ponyboy, his brother and his friends have to deal with the challenges relating to their environment. The three most important topics of The Outsiders are survival, social class and family support.

    Read More

  • Jimmy Cross: Life Story

    1153 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fantasies, which are defined as fanciful or extravagant notions, ideas, or suppositions are things he often does while on his mission to victory. During the late afternoon hours, he would frequently climb into his foxhole and read his received letters from a girl named, Martha, that he absolutely adores. She sent him letters that he guarded with his dear life and kept secretly hidden from the other men. They weren’t by any means “love” letters, but he often imagined they were just for the spite of things. Jimmy read those letters every day and every night, paying no attention to what was going on around him, just focusing on Martha. Although, letters were the main source of his absence from the world around him, he would often imagine romantically, trips into the white mountains of New Hampshire while holding the letters in his hand. He would sometimes taste the flaps, knowing her tongue had been there (Obrein, “Carried” 272). Jimmy began to pass his days more quickly by trying to keep up his hope, while thinking about being with Martha, somewhere in a beautiful place, alone, with nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, Jimmy received a pebble in one of the letters from Martha, which she picked up off the Jersey Shoreline just for Jimmy as a good luck charm. He carried the pebble in his mouth most of the time. While on other occasions, he would often slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along, the shoreline, with Martha, carrying nothing (O’brien, “Carried” 275). He fantasized daily about Martha; He wondered who she was with, and what she was doing. Although, Jimmy carried Martha’s pebble with him continuously, he began to carry much more than just a pebble in his mouth.

    Read More

  • Outsiders Thematic Essay

    664 Words  | 2 Pages

    Have you ever felt judged or marginalized only because of the situation you were born in?Having to walk on the street wondering if you’re safe. Have you ever been the one that gets made fun of? The laughing stock? The uncool one? The one with the bad luck? In S.E Hinton's The Outsiders, the Greasers are all of those things. It’s a dark world they live in but they have no choice. Although the narrator, Ponyboy, may not lead the best life, he still tries to make the most of it. Heroism, social class and survival are some of the most transcendent themes demonstrated in S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders.

    Read More

  • Thousand Splendid Suns Symbolism

    1864 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mariam … for her father for having married her off to a … man thirty years her senior. With the passage of … Mariam … her father and throughout her life preserves since all long she was made to believe that she represented slave. She realizes her wrong of eliminating her father from her life. Paired by her experiences becomes inexpressive in all her relationships. Mariam has experienced only … in her life. Destiny plays a very bitter role in the life of Mariam. Completely shattered and broken down by the … and abuses in her marriage, Mariam has learned a lesson in life and that is not to stand up and fight for her rights. After the arrival of Laila in her life and when she realizes Rasheed … towards Laila and when he compels her to make Laila … for the marriage

    Read More

  • Overcoming Reality In Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie

    1307 Words  | 3 Pages

    The power within the mind provides people with the opportunity to create an illusion of one’s life. These illusions sprout from dreams that often are unobtainable, as they strive to reach perfection in life which is known to be impossible. The mind crafted images provide people with an outlet to escape the terrifying truth of reality. Shielding oneself from reality is only a temporary solution, and can create social struggles as well as tension. The struggle between wanting to live in a fantasy of dreams to escape the world, and accepting the hardships of reality has existed in society since the beginning of time. Tennessee Williams demonstrates that many fall into the temptation to escape reality by living in an imagination where truth and responsibilities are neglected in his novel The Glass Menagerie.

    Read More

  • The Earth is Divided into Biomes

    1209 Words  | 3 Pages

    Named after Boreas, the Greek God of the North Wind, the Boreal Forest Circles the northern globe like an emerald halo. At 1.2 billion acres, Canada’s intact boreal forest stretches from coast to coast and it is the largest intact forest ecosystem remaining on earth (Kurz, Stinson & Rampley, 2008). This unique and protected mosaic of interconnected habitat includes lakes, river valleys, wetlands, peatlands and tundra, at its northern regions (Kurz, Stinson & Rampley, 2008). Its rich soils and permafrost store twice as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests and are critical in the fight against global warming (Preston, Bhatti, Flanagan & Norris, 2006).

    Read More

  • Macro Ecology Essay

    1623 Words  | 4 Pages

    Discerning the spatial patterns of biodiversity and understanding their ultimate (why) and proximate (how) causes is very dear to biogeography and is one of the key concepts of Macro ecology. Some places on earth contain more species as compared to others. All species occurring at a given space and time either originated (speciated) there or dispersed and arrived from another place and settled there. Biogeographers try to understand the past and current distributions of species by incorporating historical, evolutionary and ecological factors. Earlier biogeographers or the ‘naturalists’ in their sacred quest to serve ‘the creator’, travelled to various parts of the world and imparted valuable knowledge about the diverse patterns and processes of nature. Linnaeus (1743), on the one hand, hypothesized that early Earth was filled with water except for it’s highest mountain top i.e., Mount Ararat which was known to be the site of paradise and as the sea level dropped the exposed land was colonized by plants and animals that migrated down from high elevational zones of Mount Ararat whereas Willdenow (1805) hypothesized that within each geographical region of the earth, plants and animals were first placed and later survived the great flood on many mountain ranges (Lomolino,2001). Von Humboldt and Darwin in the South American Andes and Wallace Southeast Asian islands noticed the decreasing trend in elevational species richness patterns (McCain and Grytnes, 2010). Later work done by Grinnell (1917), Whittaker (1952), Terborgh (1977, 1985) on elevational species richness became accepted and set a established pattern for all species for more than two decades (McCain and Grytnes, 2010). However current researches on elevational gradients are...

    Read More

  • Shannon Diversity Lab Report

    1148 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this experiment, students went into the nature preserve, on the University of the Ozarks campus, to determine the amount of tree species diversity that the preserve had to offer. To calculate the diversity of a species, one should use the Shannon Diversity Index. Through use of the Shannon Diversity Index, students are able to calculate an areas diversity (plants, people, etc.) by considering the relative abundance and species richness of multiple trials in an area.

    Read More

  • Mental Disorders

    1476 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...lead to brain damage and make a person moody and can also lead to death.

    Read More

  • ASB

    1445 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...rticularly important in terms of climate change and its effects on plant distribution. It seems that spatial patterns of clusters dominated by arctic species (Luzula arcuata, Carex rupestris) are more threatened than those with significant proportion of boreal and temperate species. Callaghan et al. (2004) stressed that arctic species will be most vulnerable to the climate change. They argued that ecological amplitude of arctic taxa will narrow and abundance decrease during climate warming.

    Read More

  • The Ecological & Environmental Importance of Cork Oak Landscapes

    1095 Words  | 3 Pages

    Cork oak, Quercus suber, is native to the Woodland Biome located in the Mediterranean. These cork oak forests are common in such mediterranean countries as Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Italy, and France. Known for its high species diversity, the cork oak is one of 13,000 plant species found only in this Mediterranean Woodland (Cork Screwed? 2006). In fact, the mediterranean has the second highest level of species diversity, aside from the tropical Andes. As we know, ‘diversity begets diversity’, and this high level of plant diversity allows for a high level of animal diversity as well. Endemic to this Mediterranean biome include spiders, geckos, skinks, the Iberian Lynx, the Iberian Imperial Eagle, Barbary Deer, Cinereous Vultures, and Black Storks. Many of these species are either threatened or endangered species found only in the Mediterranean cork forests (Cork Screwed? 2006).

    Read More

  • Lolita In Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years

    2129 Words  | 5 Pages

    There was an incident following Lolita’s success that had taken place during the 1960s that seemed to appropriately illustrate people's reception to the newly deemed classic. In his biography Vladimir Nabokov : The American Years, Brian Boyd recounts Nabokov remembering a disturbing event one halloween when a young girl came to his door with her parents dressed up as Lolita (Boyd).Whether her outfit replicated the popularized Lolita in Kubrick's 1962 movie adaptation, winged eyeliner and all, or her outfit encompassed the text Lolita’s “boy shirts” (Nabokov 46) and generally “rough tomboy clothes” (Nabokov 48), the child was parading an outfit of a young girl who had been raped and manipulated, exploiting a character with no knowledge or empathy

    Read More

  • Infatuation in Lolita and the Great Gatsby

    906 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...e wide grey world, merely in order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita)” (Nabokov 70). While these were only his ideas he actually married a women, he even disgusted thinking about having any kind of erotic relationship. He even says humorously that anything sexual could only happen “under torture” (Nabokov 70). He was even thinking of killing Charlotte, but he could not do it, until Charlotte was accidently killed by a car and he got Lolita all for himself until Quilty took her from his claws.

    Read More

  • Themes Of The American Dream In Death Of A Salesman

    1265 Words  | 3 Pages

    The author and journalist Arthur Koestler once said “Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.” In Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, the main character Willy Loman’s illusion of his life led to the suffering of others due to the fact that he would not accept that he was not as successful as he believed. Biff, Willy’s son lived in his father illusion and when he realized it was all an illusion he was frustrated and fought with Willy. Biff wanted to do the activities he enjoyed and couldn’t because of his father. Happy, Willy’s other son becomes incredibly similar to his father, never leaving his illusion of how flawless his life was. In addition to this Willy’s wife Linda was constantly trying to please Willy keeping him in his illusion even though she knew they were struggling for money.Through the play Willy Loman has an obsession with the American Dream, which causes the suffering of both his sons Biff and Happy and his wife Linda, which increases the tragic vision of the play as a whole.

    Read More

  • Tropical Rainforest and Its Challenges

    1448 Words  | 3 Pages

    To compare the diversity of Odonata community between previous study (2005/2006) and the present study (2012/2013).

    Read More

More about Dreaming with Lolita

Open Document