Analysis Of Robert Evans's 'The Kid Stays In The Picture'

Conceptions of truth and absolutes are difficult terrains to navigate, complicated by notions of relativity and perspective. In his autobiography “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” film producer Robert Evans writes, “There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” The underlying presumption of statements such as this one may point to one possible reason for the allure of the unreliable narrator as a literary device. Such narrators provoke the discerning reader into questioning the very nature of the narrator and what might make one distinctly unreliable. Many first-person narrators are unreliable, particularly ones that are involved characters with narrative agency, insofar as they can transmit

The effects of Humbert growing up “in a bright world of illustrated books” is evident in his approach to life and the ways in which he mythifies his own. When Humbert first sees Lolita, he describes the incident in storied and fanciful terminology, imagining himself in his own whirlwind fantasy, as a “fairy-tale nurse of some little princess.” Magic is also a theme that occurs consistently throughout the novel – from the “magic of nymphets” to “magic potions” – further indicating Humbert’s tendency to meld fictional symbolisms into his own

The whirlwind, grandiose descriptions and the keenness of insight are so captivating, that the impact of the lascivious subject matter is noticeably tempered. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” He cautions the reader not to trust his language, acknowledging that he’s going to cloak all of his sins behind a veneer of luscious language, and that’s what the book goes on to do. Early in the novel, he says, “I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, ‘impartial sympathy.’ So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me” (57). In admitting to the difficulty before him, Humbert implicitly confesses that the event is to be told in a deliberate, falsified, way to coax his audience into this ‘impartial sympathy’ – what would be difficult if he was merely telling the truth as it happened? His use of the word ‘careful’ seems especially appropriate in this context, as everything about his word-choice and his chronological manipulations, is exceedingly so. White