Analysis of Major Characters, and other thoughts
Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European émigré. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a “monster of incuriosity”.
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, and her desertion.
In Lolita, he sees his dead love come back to life, and will do anything to possess her.
The essence of the novel is Humbert’s solipsism and his erasure of Lolita’s independent identity. To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own. Yet she does have a past, despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history.
As a narrator, Humbert Humbert is remarkable for his sardonic, satiric wit. Nabokov once said of the name:
“The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person.”
The name evokes the Spanish hombre, “man,” and the French ombre, “shadow” - much as the name of John Shade, a central character in Nabokov’s later novel Pale Fire. It also suggests a portmanteau of the English words humbug and pervert. Furthermore, the double name hints at the novel’s doppelgänger motif.
(((In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about an illicit women’s reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood.)))
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, and her desertion.
In Lolita, he sees his dead love come back to life, and will do anything to possess her.
The essence of the novel is Humbert’s solipsism and his erasure of Lolita’s independent identity. To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own. Yet she does have a past, despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history.
As a narrator, Humbert Humbert is remarkable for his sardonic, satiric wit. Nabokov once said of the name:
“The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person.”
The name evokes the Spanish hombre, “man,” and the French ombre, “shadow” - much as the name of John Shade, a central character in Nabokov’s later novel Pale Fire. It also suggests a portmanteau of the English words humbug and pervert. Furthermore, the double name hints at the novel’s doppelgänger motif.
(((In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about an illicit women’s reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood.)))