Title: The Control of Narrative Distances Through the Duality Feature in the Identity of the Narrator and The Plot Form in Lolita

Abstract: The unreliability of Lolita has long been under dispute. According to Booth, who proposed the concept of the unreliable narrator, the authorial judgment was obscured due to the endowment of full and unlimited narrative strategies to the unreliable narrator by the author. Phelan, based on the effects of the unreliable narration on the authorial reader, coined the new concept of bonding unreliability, and concluded that the dispute over the ethics of Lolita was the result of the subtle and blended use of estranging unreliability and bonding unreliability by the author. There is, in effect, a distinctive feature of duality in both the identity of the narrator and the plot form of the novel that dramatically adjusts the moral and emotional distances between the unreliable narrator and the reader.

Keywords: Lolita, unreliable narration, character relations, plot form, duality

Author: Yunfeng Fei, Lecturer, College of Foreign Languages, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.