Mahsa Hashemi

The moral compass is susceptible to external influences and even more so when an appeal to empathy is involved. Nabokov’s masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire, tend to provide evidence for and support the idea of aestheticism as protagonists of both works portray not only the aesthete’s hedonistic lifestyle but the ability to manipulate the views of those around them. The focus of the current study is morality and its vulnerability to aesthetics in the aforementioned novels, and the despair that results from adhering to aestheticism. This thesis intends to provide a new perspective through which one will be able to recognize the aestheticism in Humbert’s and Kinbote’s characters, and how it can affect the reader’s sense of sympathy and judgment. To do so, a library research is launched in order to solidify a framework through which one can examine Nabokov’s controversial protagonists. Through Kierkegaard’s concepts of Spheres of Existence and Despair, the proposed framework provides new insight into the characters of Humbert and Kinbote. The results of said Kierkegaardian framework proffers new interpretations of the narrators and their partial perspectives, tracing their motives using Kierkegaard’s concepts of aestheticism, morality and despair.