LOLITA

LOLITA

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. He studied literature in England during his college years. His life was drastically altered when, as a young man staying in Berlin, he learned that his father, an outspoken political activist, had been assassinated a short time before the Russian Revolution began; this may in part explain his fascination with the sudden, unexpected deaths that occur so frequently in Lolita. Nabokov lived his life on the move, escaping his native Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and then moving to Germany. He escaped Germany and moved to France after the Nazis assumed power in the 1930s. He then escaped France and came to America in 1940 just before the Germans captured Paris. In 1961, he left the United States and moved to Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1977.

In America, Nabokov taught at a series of colleges, including Harvard, Wellesley, Stanford, and Cornell. With the release of Lolita, which he began writing during World War II and published in 1955, he achieved national fame, allowing him to write full time. He produced a number of highly successful works in English and Russian, including Pale Fire, Mary, Pnin, and the non-fiction Speak, Memory. A highly aesthetic writer, most of his work shows an amazing interest in and talent for language.

No definitive explanation can be given for what exactly Nabokov is trying to tell us with this book. We do best, however, to view it as a work of literary art combined with a psychological exploration of a man with a serious mental problem. Lolita, like most of Nabokov's novels, forces the reader to empathize with marginal characters. Undoubtedly, Humbert is a bad human being, but one of the great tactics of the novel is its method of forcing the reader to understand Humbert through a beautiful manipulation of language. This is a novel of literary and sexual jokes ranging from the most high-brow and obscure to the most vulgar. The book has something for everyone, and it is safe to say that it is fully understood by no one. It remains, however, Nabokov's crowning achievement, and will likely be the work for which he is best remembered. Not only is it Nabokov's best book, but it is easily one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Character Analyses Humbert Humbert - A middle-aged scholar with an obsession for nymphets, he is the novel's protagonist and narrator. While in jail awaiting his trial for murdering Clare Quilty, he writes Lolita as a confession. The narrative addresses the beginning of his affair with Lolita, the several years they spend together, her desertion, and his murder of Quilty, a pedophiliac porn king.Dolores Haze - The daughter of Charlotte Haze and the step-daughter and lover of Humbert. She is described as a nymphet who holds an amazing sexual power over Humbert, essentially making him her slave. She eventually deserts him for Clare Quilty. She dies in childbirth at age 18.Charlotte Haze - The mother of Lolita and wife of Humbert. A religious woman, she cannot stand her own daughter and tries to keep her away from Humbert, whom she marries in Part One. She dies when she is struck by a car immediately after reading in Humbert's diary that he hates her and lusts after Lolita.Clare Quilty - A well-known writer who also produces child pornography. He bribes Lolita to leave Humbert and come and work for him. Humbert murders him at the end of the novel, even though Quilty is clearly insane.Valeria - Humbert's first wife. She divorces him after revealing that she is having an affair.Annabel - A young girl with whom Humbert Humbert had his first (aborted) sexual experience. She died of typhus four months later.Jean Farlow - A married woman who lives in Ramsdale and is friends with Charlotte. We see very little of her, except when she helps Humbert deal with Charlotte's death. She obviously has a big crush on Humbert.John Farlow - The husband of Jean.Richard F. Schiller - An undistinguished, destitute man whom Delores eventually marries.Miss Phalen - The owner of a boarding school to which Charlotte wishes to send Lolita.Frederick Beale - The man who drives the car that hits and kills Charlotte. He later offers to pay for her funeral expenses.Ivor Quilty - A dentist and neighbor of Charlotte and Delores. He is related to Clare Quilty.Dr. Byron - A doctor and pharmacist in Ramsdale. He gives Humbert the sleeping pills that he uses to keep Charlotte asleep.Holmes - The female head of Camp Q, which Lolita attends during the summer when Charlotte is killed.Gaston Godin - A resident of Beardsley who secures a house for Humbert and Lolita. He is a homosexual pedophile, with whom Humbert periodically plays chess.Mona Dahl - One of Lolita's friends at Beardsley, in whom Humbert attempts to become sexually interested.Miss Pratt - The Headmistress of the Beardsley School, which Lolita attends.Rita - A woman in her mid-20s with whom Humbert has an affair after Lolita disappears. Their relationship lasts exactly two years, and ends when Humbert is contacted out of the blue by Lolita requesting money.Summary The protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is writing the manuscript for Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male from a jail cell, where he is incarcerated for the murder of Clare Quilty. Although he is about to be placed on trial for murder, his manuscript recounts the history of his sexual affair with a young "nymphet" named Dolores Haze, a.k.a. Lolita. Humbert writes that he has had an obsession with nymphets his whole adult life, beginning with his unrequited passion for a young girl named Annabel with whom he fell in love as a young boy. His sexual acts with Annabel were never fully satisfied, leaving a perpetual desire for young girls, fulfilled only when he falls for Lolita. After telling about his own family life, Humbert mentions his first marriage to a woman named Valeria, a marriage that ended very badly when Valeria left him for another man on the eve of their emigration from France to America. Having never really loved her, Humbert is not too shaken up about his loss, although he does mention having several work-related mental breakdowns.

Once in America, on the advice of a friend, Humbert takes up residence in the town of Ramsdale; he rents a room in a house owned by Charlotte Haze and her daughter, Dolores (also known, in Humbert's mind, as Lolita). He immediately becomes obsessed with the 12-year-old Lolita, a nymphet who reminds him of Annabel. Charlotte and Lolita do not get along at all, however, and Charlotte decides to send Lolita off to summer camp followed by boarding school. Meanwhile, Charlotte proposes marriage to Humbert. Despite his great dislike for her, Humbert readily accepts, because the marriage will give him the opportunity to be with Lolita at all times. Lolita goes off to summer camp, and the marriage occurs while she is away, but before she returns her mother discovers Humbert's private journal. After reading of Humbert's disgust for her and lust for Lolita, Charlotte goes insane, telling Humbert that he will never see Lolita again. She runs out into the street to mail a letter to Lolita about Humbert's sick intentions, but she is suddenly hit and killed by a car.Soon afterwards, Humbert goes to fetch Lolita from camp, although he tells her that her mother is only in the hospital. They go to a hotel for the night, where they have sex for the first time and become lovers. Humbert later tells Lolita that her mother is dead, and they begin a year-long driving tour that takes them to almost all 48 contiguous states. They see hundreds of attractions everywhere, all the while continuing their affair.

After a year, they move to Lolita's hometown, Beardsley, where Humbert enrolls Lolita in a private girls school that stresses social interaction with males above academics. Humbert, however, quickly becomes paranoid and jealous, fighting with Lolita frequently about her allowance and her associations with boys her age. Eventually, Lolita mysteriously announces that she wishes to leave Beardsley and go on another long drive, to which Humbert readily consents. While touring the nation again, however, Humbert notices that they are being followed by what appears to be a detective (we later learn that it is Clare Quilty, a demented writer with an obsession for child pornography and an intense love for Lolita). Suddenly, Lolita completely vanishes, leaving Humbert all alone. We learn at the end of the novel that she has gone off with Clare Quilty. At the time, though, Humbert does not know any details about her disappearance; he drives around by himself looking at all the places they had visited, trying to learn the truth. Later, he has a two-year love affair with an insane woman in her mid-20s named Rita.

About three years after Lolita's disappearance, Humbert receives a letter from the now 18-year-old Lolita, announcing that she is married and pregnant, and that she needs money. Humbert goes to her house and tells her that he still loves her immensely. He gives her four thousand dollars to help her and her husband, but in exchange he demands to know with whom she had disappeared on that road trip. She tells him about Quilty, which sends Humbert into a rage. He bids goodbye to Lolita for the last time before setting out to find Quilty. When he reaches Quilty's house, he breaks in with a gun, tells Quilty what a horrible man he is, then murders him. Driving away from the house, Humbert realizes that in his life he has broken virtually every moral law imaginable, so he might as well break some legal laws as well. He begins driving on the left side of the road just for fun, and he makes a practice of running red lights, which quickly gets him arrested. The police officers, seeing him covered in blood and finding his gun, arrest him and later charge him with the murder of Quilty. Humbert, who is writing this book as his testimonial for the jury, admits that he deserves to be locked up for his affair with a 12-year-old girl, but he claims that the murder of Quilty did society a favor by destroying a sick pervert.

We learn from the Foreword that Humbert died in prison and that Lolita died in childbirth a short while later. Her baby was stillborn.

ANALYSIS

Nabokov's Lolita is a book that deals with obsessive lust and bloody violence, the real horrors of which are often masked by the beautiful, clever language of the novel. Indeed, Humbert's early job as a perfume salesman mimics and evokes this masking and sweetening aspect of language. Sudden, horrible death occurs frequently in Lolita, but the book is better served if we study it as an experiment in language and the way words are used to treat the book's horrific subjects.

Identifying the sudden deaths of the work is not difficult. Beginning with Humbert's mother, whose famous death by "(picnic, lightning)" is mentioned in Part One, we learn of the sudden if not unexpected deaths of Annabel, Charlotte, and Quilty, and even those of Humbert and Lolita. We also see lots of sudden loss in the novel, with Valeria's surprising announcement that she is having an affair and Lolita's sudden disappearance on the second road trip. Usually, the deaths are treated casually, as seen most poignantly in the parenthetical mention of his mother's death. Humbert seems emotionally dissociated from many events in his life.

The sudden moments of great interest in the novel all indicate the strong presence of fate and random chance. Charlotte is struck by pure accident when a car swerves to avoid hitting a dog that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Humbert's loss of his mother to lightning is nothing more than a random act of bad luck. The general tendency of the novel is to indicate that, as Humbert himself points out, chance is a major factor in life and in death; in some ways, this truth diminishes the tragedy that accompanies loss, because we know that nature is fickle and random.

Lolita can be viewed as a novel about sex and murder, but better as a novel about the liberation of desire. Humbert is a man who essentially gets what he wants in this book. He wants to get married at the beginning, so he marries Valeria. He wants to make love to Lolita, so he marries Charlotte to get near her and eventually succeeds. He wants revenge on Quilty, so he murders him. In each part of the book, we see what Humbert wants and how he goes about getting it. We learn in exquisite detail his inner drives and motivations. He has a clear vision of what his body craves and will do virtually anything to get it, short of physically raping Lolita. The book takes us through all his inner desires, both echoing and manipulating Freudian theories regarding psychological exploration. But it is also a narrative written by a frustrated murderer in his jail cell, reflecting back on how he found freedom in satisfying his urges, be they to have sex or to do harm to others, two of the most basic human instincts.

Lolita is divided into two parts. The first deals with Humbert's growing lust for his stepdaughter and ends with the beginning of their affair; its fundamental action is the sex between Humbert and Lolita. The second deals with the loss of Lolita and the hunt for Quilty; its fundamental action is his murder. Thus, we have the act of creation in part one juxtaposed with the ultimate act of destruction in part two. Between these two great and intensely personal acts lies a flowery narrative studded with some of the best puns, word plays, allusions, and some of the most beautiful writing to be found in any English novel. In these middle sections the book's fun, clever tone overshadows the more distressing events, and reveals perhaps the most fundamental theme of Lolita: language, and the ability of language to reveal and conceal simultaneously, to be beautiful and hide the truth within the folds of its beauty. Humbert, the first-person narrator, presents the action of the novel, bloody or lovely, through a glowing, magnificent prose that allows him to talk his way out of almost any situation. At times, he can even convince the reader that his lust for Lolita, a young girl, should not be abhorred. Humbert drops all sorts of ideas and clues (including false clues) everywhere, some of which have meaning and some of which just cannot be understood in any definite way. His language is designed to tell his story while presenting himself in the best possible light. Any reader will do best not to ask what every incident in Lolita means, but rather how those images, characters, and situations are created. As much as it is a story about the events that make up its plot, Lolita is also a story about how that plot is related through language. PAGE 6