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Trials And Verdicts: Narratives Of Recollection In The Good Soldier And Lolita, Constance Elizabeth Holmes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will apply the structure of a legal trial’s procedures to two Modernist novels: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). These novels position themselves as renderings of legal proceedings, the written memoriam of metaphorical trials conducted by first person narrators who alternatively and simultaneously function as Plaintiff’s counsel, Defense Counsel and finally as witnesses to the events of the story. All of these personae reveal evidence and testimony presented in the forum of a trial of the central characters who recollect legal events and whose narrations develop moral questions. Thus these narrations are …