Aristotle and Nabokov: Honda Rivera’s thoughts

Nabokov states that a good writer is a combination of being a storyteller, a reader, and an enchanter. He also states that although the author needs imagination, the author also needs intelligence, because it is the writer who creates the world that is portrayed to the audience. The writer plays the role as the deceiver by choosing how the reader develops opinions about the characters in the novel. The writer is the one who controls the reader’s attitude towards this newly created world by controlling the way the reader experiences the senses (i.e. such as pleasant or unpleasant). Aristotle similarly believed that only that which has magnitude will make a good story, but he goes further to say that a story shouldn’t have unnecessary material and a story needs a certain structure consisting of a beginning, middle, and an end in order to be good material for the reader. Nabokov speaks not so much between the aspects within a story structure in order to create a good story, but of the relationship a writer has to their story, and the relationship a writer has to their reader. He believes more in that the writer needs to create a relationship between themselves and the reader in order to create a world that the reader can easily immerse themselves in. In Nabokov’s essay, we read that a writer creates a fake reality of a world that might already exist, but because it is a portrayal of a fictional world, it will never be truly like our real world. Aristotle states the same idea, that because we are creating a new experience for a person, it is necessary to only capture the essence of the world, therefore we would eliminate all within the story and the world that is not needed in order to tell the story properly. This follows Aristotle’s belief that our ideas are not originals, and that we must try to present perfect versions, such as a perfect hero, or a perfect society, to the audience.