The passage below is from a famous, and very complex and ironic novel,
which has been the subject of considerable critical acclaim and argument,
because of its subject-matter. Lolita was first published in 1955. The
1st-person narrator, Humbert Humbert, is telling his story from prison,
in the form of a direct written address to the jury at his trial. He is
clearly going to be convicted of murder and sexually assaulting a minor.
But this 1st-person narration, and its ironic, self-deprecating and humorous
style means that it is difficult not to sympathise with the narrator,
even though he has committed heinous crimes.
Humbert Humbert falls headlong in love with Lolita, a teenage beauty
and a minor. He, persuades Lolita's mother to marry him (so that he becomes
Lolita's legal guardian) and then secretly murders her, so that he can
be alone with Lolita. The extract below occurs soon after Humbert Humbert
has murdered Lolita's mother (in a ludicrous fashion, by making her so
angry that she runs out of the house at exactly the moment a car regularly
drives past their house, and so is run down by the car). Lolita is away
at summer camp at the time, and Humbert Humbert now takes her away from
the camp, pretending that his wife, and Lolita's mother, is ill. Here
they are, driving away from the camp.
Using your Speech Presentation checksheet, for each
sentence, or part of a sentence, note down the mode of speech presentation
you think is used. The speech presentation modes you are looking for are
DS, FIS, IS, NRSA and NV. (Note that you may find more than one category
in some sentences.) Some sentences do not involve speech presentation
at all, and you may find it helpful to label these with 'N' for Narration.
You can compare your analyses with ours using the button at the end of
the passage.
'How's Mother?' she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway,
something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang
around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town
of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth
century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy
idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before 9 p.m.
'We should be at Briceland by dinner time,' I said, 'and tomorrow we'll
visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvellous time
at the camp?'
'Uh-huh.'
'Sorry to leave?'
'Un-un.'
'Talk, Lo, - don't grunt. Tell me something.'
Now note down why you think
the author has made the choices he or she has decided upon - i.e. assess
what effect(s) those choices have on you, the reader (e.g. in terms of
manipulating your sympathies). Then compare your thoughts with ours.
Our commentary:
Compared with the other two extracts, there is considerably more presentational
change in this passage, which clearly contributes to its ironic flavour,
and FIS, the form most directly associated with irony, is also used
quite a lot.
Although Lolita's first question is in DS, suggesting she is worried
about the health of her mother, the information in the accompanying
reporting clause undercuts the prototypical associations we have for
DS. Humbert Humbert's reply on the other hand, is in IS, a backgrounded
presentational form. He is definitely not interested in the health of
Lolita's mother because he knows she is actually dead!
The misunderstanding Humbert Humbert and Lolita have over abdominal/abominable
is in a form ambiguous between DS and FIS. This enables Humbert Humbert
to achieve the 'quick-fire' effect of DS, but at the same time cast
the conversation in a humorous light. The silly misunderstanding is
not untypical of conversations between parents and children, and the
comic nature of the interchange in its FIS-DS form is at peculiarly
at odds with the fact that Lolita is not that interested in her mother's
supposed illness, and our knowledge that Humbert Humbert is hiding the
fact that he has killed her. The FIS form for Humbert Humbert in particular
is clearly marked. We would not normally expect a narrator to undercut
himself with the use of FIS in the way that Humbert Humbert does.
Once the irony is established in this way, it is then possible for
last part of the extract to have its quick-fire 'DS with no reporting
clauses' form. It is contextually very clear who says which sentence,
and in another typical parent-child interaction about reasonable behaviour.
And of course this exchange is ironic even though FIS is not used, because
of the mismatch between Humbert Humbert's real role and his apparent
role in the conversation.
Perhaps the last point to make about this passage is the way that the
reporting clause in:
[DS] 'We should be at Briceland by dinner time,' [N] I said, [DS]
'and tomorrow we'll visit Lepingville.
Helps us to see the two halves of the sentence as broken into two separate
discoursal units. He effectively tells her she can be in Briceland by
the time she wants, and then (perhaps after a pause, or in a different
tone of voice) makes Lolita even happier by telling her of a nice thing
they can do the following day too.
