Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/25424
Title: Narrative seduction and the reader’s sympathy in ‘Lolita’ and ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’
Authors: Cutajar, Marta Anne
Keywords: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977. Lolita -- Criticism and interpretation
Kesey, Ken, 1935-2001. One flew over the cuckoo's nest -- Criticism and interpretation
Fiction -- Technique
Narration (Rhetoric)
Sympathy in literature
Issue Date: 2017
Abstract: This dissertation will deal with narrative seduction and the effect of narrative technique on the reader in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It will analyse the way in which the narrative technique and devices used by the author modulate one’s reading in terms of sympathy for the narrator and other characters in the novel. These particular novels were chosen to investigate how an author manages to wield sympathy in favour of a narrator with whom the reader might not, outside the circumstances of the novel, sympathise with: Humbert Humbert as a paedophile, and Chief Bromden as a man who takes a life. It will focus on the conflicting feelings of sympathy and reproach felt towards both narrators, to different extents. The first chapter, which is also the introductory chapter, will contextualise the theoretical aspect of this dissertation by discussing a brief history of the study of narratology and focusing on concepts such as reader sympathy, point of view, narrative reliability, the implied author, the implied reader and Ross Chambers’s theory of narrative seduction and narratorial authority. The following two chapters will close read the two novels in terms of the theoretical issues outlined above. Chapter Two applies Chambers’s theory of seduction to understand how Humbert seduces his reader into sympathising with him. Chapter Three focuses more on Chambers’s idea of narratorial authority to note how Bromden wields this authority in such a way that the ending comes as a shock to the reader. Both chapters focus on how the use of the first person as opposed to the use of the third person modulates the reader’s sympathy. In concluding, this dissertation will take a comparative approach between the two novels, most importantly in terms of how the double voice of the implied author and the narrator modulates the reader’s sympathy differently.
Description: B.A.(HONS)ENGLISH
URI: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar//handle/123456789/25424
Appears in Collections:Dissertations - FacArt - 2017
Dissertations - FacArtEng - 2017

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