Phyllis A. Roth, in "Aesthetic Bliss" tackles the problem of multiple realities: the inherent "reality" in a work of fiction, and the inherent fiction (or the application of subjective, or, "internalized", perceptions, which need not be factual, i.e., have a basis in an "objective" sense) in "reality." Humbert is a prime example of the latter (in spite of his obvious fictitiousness): "his falsifying perceptions... distort reality" (Roth 35). As the writer, the artist, of Lolita, the memoir, Humbert is creating a reality, a world, which operates within certain parameters, rules. Furthermore, Humbert's so-called delusions are a part of that reality, informing it and unforming it: "the two-fold nature of the paradise is a function of Humbert's dual perception, the simultaneous perception of reality and of illusion" (38). This is to say also, that, the reader is aware of the fiction, but, that Humbert relates, and we must allow him to, his experiences and perceptions as a reality, the reader becomes an arbiter of sorts over multiple realities in competition with one another, being: one, the implied reality of Humbert, as Nabokov's artistic creation; two, the reality, the existence, of delusions and fantasy, in general, and in Lolita, as viewed as Humbert's artistic creation: "the created nature– the fictive nature, if you will– of art"; and three, the reality of "reality" (35).
(The big, and unfortunately, unanswerable, question is: how do we know what is real? Reality relies on agreement. A society and a culture, respectively, through processes of normalization, create ontological and epistemological paradigms that are adopted by individuals within these larger categories in order to facilitate comprehension and mutual understandability. Without such, there would be no "reality" (the inverted commas here should suggest both the protean nature of the word, and the aural/visual physicality (from the Greek, phusis- "nature") of the symbol (perhaps, in some sense an indexical, too.)))
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