Office Of Admissions

Office Of Admissions It is a book of perpetual discussion, conversation, and questioning. My initial impression was that the truth of Lolita, its ugliness, was hidden behind its beautiful prose. It uses flowery words of love and affection to trick the reader into believing in some kind of horrid love story. I had thought that my job as the reader was to peel back the layers of beautiful imagery to reveal the novel’s and Humbert’s grotesque center. I wanted to brush off the proselike dust off an old book. After that I became obsessed with reading, falling into my old habits of staying up late to read the last chapter, staying in to read at lunch, and going to the library every weekend. I am forever grateful to Pride and Prejudice for reigniting the passion for reading I had lost in middle school. The move to Texas was one of the hardest transitions in my life as I was greeted with a culture shock and had to reinvent myself. In California my peers and I had shared the same views. We were all so liberal which at the time felt like a blessing, but when I got to Texas it seemed as though everywhere I went my ideas were challenged. I had thought that the truth was beneath this, like a mystery waiting to be solved. Maybe there was someone who had successfully revealed the “truth” of Lolita in all it’s ugliness, someone who had pushed past all Lolita ’s beauty and emerged with a final knowledge of it. To clarify, my response was not a result of any past trauma. My visceral reaction to Lolita remains a mystery to me. The words “no documents, no person” are spoken by Woland’s right-hand, Koroviev, to Master when he is rescued. Master immediately worries that he will be in trouble if someone finds him with paper proof that he is “sick”. Documents meant the difference between life and death in Stalin’s regime. This harsh reality that I saw in the novel impressed me. Coming from a post-Soviet country still struggling with its past, where some adore past times while others despise them, I am interested in how the regime worked to indoctrinate people. Although the novel is not a history book, its presentation of characters helps to crystallize the essence of what the Soviet Union looked like. The fact of it being a literary work has made it easier for me to comprehend and visualize the historical period which was so devastating to my country. The novel helped me understand that the harder an ideology is pushed on people, the harder they will rebel in indirect ways. The constant fear turned people into animals willing to do anything to survive. If you flip through the book now, you can see the pages I gripped so tightly that they tore. After reading Lolita, my brother and I spent the following days dissecting every minute detail, trying to find some kind of understanding of Lolita. We searched together for insight, sat up late after dinner arguing about whether or not Humbert loved Dolores, and what the final meeting between Humbert and Dolores meant. My experience of Lolita is intrinsically connected to the discussions I had with my brother. Lolita inspired in me a fervent hunger for discussion of truth. It has made me notice links between the story and my generation. The novel focuses on ways the Soviet regime exerted its power on its people. The words manifested in my body, and remain there today. I can’t look at it without a wave of nausea and fascination crashing over me. I would uncomprehendingly coast through my classes, molding my knowledge to fit the next quiz and promptly forgetting it afterwards. School didn’t require, and at times, actively discouraged my insatiable desire to figure out the puzzles of the world, so I shoved that side of myself away and forgot that it even existed. The novel also addresses conformism and its effects on society. The conformism in the novel is blindly following government orders, not questioning the comical levels of commodity deficits, the lack of freedom of speech, and restrictions on art. The quote from the introduction shows an even bigger tragedy. For fear of being next to disappear or jealousy because someone lives a tiny bit better than you, espionage and treason become a normal part of life. This sense of clarity I received, was due in part to Pride and Prejudice because even though it did not provide me with the answers to my questions, it had given me a sense of self awareness. The notion that prejudice clouds perception was a truth that I don’t imagine I’d have come to as early without the help of Austen and it made me wonder how much more I could learn from reading. By the time high school rolled around, that girl was nowhere to be found. After years and years of being told what to think and the “right” questions to ask, I had retreated into intellectual paralysis.