Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

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Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Humbert Humbert. A delusional, sick, middle aged man obsessed with a self created love for pre-pubescent girls he has namely dubbed nymphets. Right? Wrong, this is only the skin-deep image we are given of the main character in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Rather, He is a highly intelligent chess master who is constantly aware of his environment and is able to manipulate it with minute actions bringing him the results he desires.

Humbert’s obsession for the opposite sex starts in chapters three and four when we are introduced to his first love - Annabel. As Humbert recalls his beloved nymphets, he talks of two kinds of visual memory pertaining to remembering a face. One that a person, with their eyes open, must recreate, piece by piece, taking little details of vivid moments in time and putting them all together. The other, an instant glimpse, as if a flash bulb goes off inside your head, and instinctively, an “objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors” appears “on the dark innerside of your eyelids” (Nabokov 11). I would like to expand on the latter of the two ideologies, saying that this image, the more one thinks about it, the clarity soon fades. The reasoning for this being emotional attachment, one’s mind begins to wander about things that occurred in the past. Perhaps why he isn’t looking at the face in real life right then, instead of picturing it in his imagination. These emotional ties to that person may be for various reasons, but those aren’t important, it is the depth of them that bears the significance. He remembers Lolita’s face in the second of the two ways because of the extreme feelings he had built up for her throughout the time he was with her. Humbert recalls Annabel’s face with the first method simply because she was his first. Not because of any serious feelings for her; at least compared to the magnitude of those for Lolita.

Writing from the confines of a jail cell, Humbert Humbert tells us this story of his sex-capade across the country with little Dolores Haze. He fills his pages with incredible detail, often wandering on certain subjects seeming unimportant, but written as if crucial to understanding his point. An example of this is Humbert’s recollection of the lake and its splendor, being more than just a place to swim and relax; but a...

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...nsignificant souvenirs and pointless tours of monuments they encountered along the trip. He couldn’t risk being caught; it isn’t far fetched to imagine Lolita throwing a fit and spilling her guts to an official for the mere refusal of an ice cream cone Humbert wouldn’t buy her.

So, in coming to a conclusion, I feel that Humbert Humbert isn’t crazy, or emotionally disturbed, but rather a bit vulnerable. His original fling with Annabel had such a strong impact on him, that from then on, he had a predetermination of what beauty in the opposite sex was - a nymphet. He has a strange fetish, which he allows to turn into obsession. Being immoral and illegal, his actions are condemned by all. Imagine all that he has taken away from a little girl’s growing up. He turned her into a personal prostitute, and forced her to become more mature than anyone her age. In the end, Humbert Humbert gets what is deserved and goes to jail; but not for reasons pertaining to his deeds with Lolita. His jealous murder of Clare Quilty finally sees him to his prison cell where he is sentenced to life. From there, the only way to embrace his obsession is through writing, and thus we are given the novel Lolita.

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