Lolita

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set..."

In this passage, Nabokov exemplifies the post modernistic techniques found throughout Lolita. The death of his mother, historically depicted as a tragic ordeal, is given nothing more than a passing mention":(picnic,lightning)". Evoking the characteristic fragmentary experience of Postmodern writing, the details of her death are abstract at best. The narrator,Humbert Humbert(the name itself a reference to Poe's William Wilson, in which the character is haunted by his doppelganger.In the case of Lolita, it is Clare Quilty) refutes the objectivist writing of the earlier Modernist period. Humbert Humbert is the classic unreliable narrator,utilizing his skillful wordplay to elicit sympathy from the reader. Humbert graciously asks the reader if they "can still stand his style", and sentimentally tells his story of a deprived/traumatic childhood.