Humbert Humbert of Lolita and James Gatsby of The Great Gatsby

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At first glance, one might find it difficult to draw comparisons between the two protagonists: James Gatsby, from The Great Gatsby, and Humbert Humbert, from Lolita. Gatsby’s is the tragic story of a self-made man who built himself an empire for a woman who would never love him. Humbert Humbert, on the other hand, is a manipulative and witty pervert who lusts after the vulgar nymphet, Lolita. Both men are extremely similar in one key aspect, however. Both Gatsby and Humbert have idealized an encounter from their youth and that idealization has become a driving obsession in each of their lives.

In her essay, “Attachment to the Missing Object: Infidelity and Obsessive Love,” Lucinda Williams says that “the passion displayed in such obsessions is triggered by unconscious longing for and the inability to accept the loss of the object” (385). This is clearly true of both Humbert and Gatsby, who never seem to evolve past their first love. This essay will explore the roots of the obsessions of both Gatsby and Humbert using Williams’ psychoanalytic approach. It will also argue that, though in extremely different situations, Gatsby and Humbert obsessions are quite similar. The essay first deals with Humbert’s obsession and then moves on to Gatsby’s.

Williams states early on in her essay that “a common form of early object loss occurs when a child has not been able to internalize a constant maternal object due to parental failure or unavailability, and has instead internalized the unavailable or missing object” (384). This statement is certainly true of Humbert Humbert. He tells his audience early in his narration that “[my] very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three,...

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Works Cited

Brink, Andrew. Obsession and Culture. London: Associated UP, 1996.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London: Standard, 135-243

Lewis, Richard. “Money, Love, and Aspiration in Great Gatsby.” New Essays on the Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Mitchell, Lucinda. “Attachment to the Missing Object: Infidelity and Obsessive Love.” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 2.4 (2000): 383-395.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. New York: Random House, 1991.

Pifer, Ellen. Demon or Doll. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000.

Raliegh, John Henry. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Legendary Bases and Allegorical Significances.” Ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

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