Solipsism in Lolita

Solipsism, which is the theory that one’s mind is the only entity certain to exist, has various moral implications that allow people with solipsistic views of their world to justify their mistreatment of others. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, a self-proclaimed murderer and lover of “nymphets”, demonstrates a solipsistic worldview which causes him to see everything in relationship to himself, creating new personas for various characters and only narrating the series of events from his perspective. Humbert’s solipsism makes him view everything that happens to him solely from his point of view, as he believes his mind is all that exists, therefore making the events that transpire solely acts of fate and the people he encounters figments of his imagination. Humbert’s solipsism compromises the reliability of his narration, as he describes characters exclusively from his point of view by stripping them of their individuality and describing them solely in relation to himself; Humbert’s tendency to write exclusively from his own point of view forces the reader to accept the series of events he presents as the truth, without any external input, allowing him to completely control the reader’s perception of him and the events of the novel.

Humbert’s solipsism allows him to create his own imaginary world in which he controls everything, including the creation of a cast of characters whom he describes however he sees fit; Humbert’s description of various characters, especially Charlotte Haze, and allow him to control the reader’s perception of the plot, removing any objectivity from his narration. Humbert’s desire for sympathy from the reader in order to justify his actions causes him to describe certain characters in specif...

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...the various names that accompany them, writing, “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita” (9). By using attributing different names to the various roles she plays and creating the name Lolita to use when she is with him, Humbert makes the character Lolita a figment of his expansive imagination. In one of Humbert’s rare moments of overt honesty he writes, “Lolita had been safely solipsized…I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it…” (60) and later continues to write, “what I had possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita- perhaps more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no