How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse.

Foster uses one of fiction’s most repellent figures, the child abuser Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita to tackle the subject of antiheroes or villains in Postmodern fiction. Before that, he shows why the Postmodern antihero deserves separate analysis. Until the 20th century, writers clearly delineated villains and heroes: The villain served as an obstacle for the hero to conquer or a monster to vanquish. However, as narratives began to dwell more on the thoughts, feelings, and psyche of characters, antiheroes developed an interior life too. Moreover, antiheroes began to move from the margins of the text into the space occupied by the hero or the main character. The lines between hero and villain blurred. This reflects the modern-age acceptance that everyone is deeply flawed.

While antiheroes are mostly flawed and complicated souls, sometimes in literature, an antihero is a “real bad actor” (91), a character with little conscience or empathy, as in the case of Humbert, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Lolita. The fact that Humbert marries a woman only so that he can get close to her vulnerable young daughter and then abuses the child should make him a character that readers shun.