I had quite an unfortunate tutorial presentation experience yesterday, caused mostly by my refusal to ever read the endings of books. I just can't do it - the last twenty pages or so I just have to skim, or else it feels like I'm going to vomit or something. I don't understand why, but its always been this way, and as a consequence, the endings of everything I've ever read are pretty sketchy.

So of course, I think to myself "I can present on Lolita without a real understanding of the ending - what tricks could Nabokov possibly have up his sleeve?". Not seeing how this could lead to tutorial death I go in, read my carefully prepared little talk, then face a barrage of accusatory questions such as "don't you think that scene at the end might contradict your reading of blah", "hasn't Nabokov sort of subverted the meaning of the entire novel in that scene, you know, that one within the last twenty pages". All I could come up with was "it's a novel full of contradictions [vomit!]". Then everyone started attacking me with PoMo theory ("can we really talk about a "real"?), so instead of responding I decided just to take slow and reflective sips from my water bottle, hoping they'd run out of steam in the interim.

HOWEVER, although I didn't read the last twenty pages, I still disagree with their argument. Basically they were saying that because we subsequently discover that Lolita/Dolores was "cheating" on her Paedophile Humbert, therefore she deserves less of our sympathy, cause like, only "nice" victims of paedophilia deserve our sympathy, right? Hmmmm.