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Controversial viewpoint: the whole thing is actually created by Vladimir Nabokov.
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Aug 7, 2016 06:43
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Heath posted:Please don't waste thread space with ridiculous things like this. What's more ridiculous is people who cheapen an Unreliable Narrator device with vigorously defended "fan theories" 
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Aug 7, 2016 08:30
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Tree Goat posted:Boyd is certainly silly (I think one of the essays linked in the OP accuses him of going "an exegetic bridge too far" which sounds about right), but from things like The Vane Sisters we can see that Nabokov is not above playing the kind of games that Boyd uses for evidence, and the theme of the supernatural floats around consistently enough without a satisfying referent, that it's tempting to play New Criticism style games with the work, even though the Author is stone cold Dead. I think Kinbote's unreliability functions very differently as a device than, for instance, Humbert Humbert, so reducing them both to just lines on a TV Tropes page cuts off some interesting approaches to tackling the work. I think this book was definitely intended to facilitate interpretations of every shape and size, more so than an average unreliable narration. But I've seen there's a fine line between having fun with subtext and suppressing some actual meaningful discussion. Sharing different interpretations could enlighten your fellow readers and challenge them to see new details, but then it can also devolve into some kind of juvenile "picking sides" where the emphasis is put on who can back up their own reading. Then I get suspicious if someone actually thinks that Hazel is the key figure of the book or if they're just trying to have a unique stance.
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Aug 7, 2016 22:49
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