Lolita Summary John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.

writes in a foreword that Humbert Humbert, author of the following manuscript, titled "Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male," died in jail just before his trial was to start in 1952. Humbert narrates hereafter. He details his European childhood and background as a scholar and relates his tragic childhood love for Annabel Leigh, whose death traumatized Humbert. Humbert is now obsessively attracted to "nymphets," young girls who possess a mysterious seductive power.After shuttling around some mental institutions and doing odd writing jobs, Humbert lands in the New England town of Ramsdale. He takes a room at the house of widower Charlotte Haze because her beautiful young daughter, Lolita, reminds him of Annabel. Humbert lusts after and flirts with Lolita, but is afraid to do anything lest the repulsive Haze, who wants Humbert, discover her lodger's pedophilia. Lolita goes off to summer camp, and Humbert reluctantly marries Haze, since it is his only chance to keep Lolita in his life. Humbert toys with the idea of killing Haze, but is unable to do it. She discovers his diary, filled with entries about his love for Lolita and hatred for her, and tells him she is leaving. However, she is immediately hit by a car, and Humbert picks Lolita up at camp. He eventually breaks the news about her mother's death, and at a hotel called The Enchanted Hunter, they have sex for the first time. A strange man seems to take a keen interest in them. Humbert and Lolita drive across the U.S. for one year. Humbert threatens to put Lolita in an orphanage if she does not comply with his sexual demands. Humbert gets a job at Beardsley College and enrolls Lolita in the girls' school there. Lolita's desire to socialize with boys strains her relationship with Humbert, and he finally agrees to let her participate in a school play called "The Enchanted Hunters." Humbert suspects Lolita of infidelity, and they leave for another road trip. A man who resembles a relative of Humbert's named Trapp seems to be following them, and Lolita appears to be in contact with him. When Lolita gets sick and is placed in a doctor's office, she is taken away by the man who resembles Trapp. Humbert tries to find her for the next two years, but to no avail. He takes up with a woman named Rita for two years until he receives a letter from Lolita, now married, pregnant, and asking for money. Humbert plans to kill Lolita's husband, but when he visits them, finds out that her kidnaper was actually Clare Quilty, a playwright with whom Lolita was in love. When she refused to participate in his child pornography films, he rejected her. Lolita declines Humbert's invitation to live with him, and he leaves heartbroken. Humbert finds out where Quilty lives and, after talking with Quilty and shooting him numerous times, kills him. Humbert is arrested and put in jail, where he finishes his memoir. As we learned from the foreword, he died soon after in captivity, and Lolita died while giving childbirth that Christmas.

Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Power of Language Nabokov revered words and believed that the proper language could elevate any material to the level of art. In Lolita, language effectively triumphs over shocking content and gives it shades of beauty that perhaps it does not deserve. Lolita is filled with sordid subjects, including rape, murder, pedophilia, and incest. However, Humbert Humbert, in telling his story, uses puns, literary allusions, and repeating linguistic patterns to render this dark tale in an enchanting form. In this way, Humbert seduces his readers as fully and slyly as he seduces Lolita herself. Words are his power, and he uses them to distract, confuse, and charm. He is a pedophile and a murderer, but he builds up elaborate defenses and explanations for his actions, and his language shields him from judgment. With Lolita, Nabokovs ultimate achievement may be that he forces readers to be complicit in Humberts crimes. In order to uncover the actual story of pedophilia, rape, and murder within the text, readers have to immerse themselves in Humberts words and their shadowy meaningsand thus they must enter Humberts mind. By engaging so closely with Humberts linguistic trickery, readers cannot hold him at a far enough distance to see him for the man he truly is.

The Dispiriting Incompatibility of European and American Cultures Throughout Lolita, the interactions between European and American cultures result in perpetual misunderstandings and conflict. Charlotte Haze, an American, is drawn to the sophistication and worldliness of Humbert, a European. She eagerly accepts Humbert not so much because of who he is, but because she is charmed by what she sees as the glamour and intellect of Humberts background. Humbert has no such reverence for Charlotte. He openly mocks the superficiality and transience of American culture, and he views Charlotte as nothing but a simple-minded housewife. However, he adores every one of Lolitas vulgarities and chronicles every detail of his tour of Americahe enjoys the possibilities for freedom along the open American road. He eventually admits that he has defiled the country rather than the other way around. Though Humbert and Lolita develop their own version of peace as they travel together, their union is clearly not based on understanding or acceptance. Lolita cannot comprehend the depth of Humberts devotion, which he overtly links to art, history, and culture, and Humbert will never truly recognize Lolitas unwillingness to let him sophisticate her. Eventually, Lolita leaves Humbert for the American Quilty, who does not bore her with high culture or grand passions. The Inadequacy of Psychiatry Humberts passion for Lolita defies easy psychological analysis, and throughout Lolita Humbert mocks psychiatrys tendency toward simplistic, logical explanations. In the foreword to Lolita, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., claims that Humberts tale will be of great interest to psychiatry, but throughout his memoir Humbert does his best to discredit the entire field of study, heaping the most scorn on Freudian psychology. For example, he enjoys lying to the psychiatrists at the sanitarium. He reports mockingly that Pratt, the headmistress of Lolitas school, diagnoses Lolita as sexually immature, wholly unaware that she actually has an overly active sex life with her stepfather. By undermining the authority and logic

of the psychiatric field, Nabokov demands that readers view Humbert as a unique and deeply flawed human being, but not an insane one. Humbert further thwarts efforts of scientific categorization by constantly describing his feelings for Lolita as an enchantment or spell, closer to magic than to science. He tries to prove that his love is not a mental disease but an enormous, strange, and uncontrollable emotion that resists easy classification. Nabokov himself was deeply critical of psychiatry, and Lolita is, in a way, an attack on the field.

The Alienation Caused by Exile

Humbert and Lolita are both exiles, and, alienated from the societies with which they are familiar, they find themselves in ambiguous moral territory where the old rules seem not to apply. Humbert chooses exile and comes willingly from Europe to America, while Lolita is forced into exile when Charlotte dies. She becomes detached from her familiar community of Ramsdale and goes on the road with Humbert. Together, they move constantly and belong to no single fixed place. The tourists Humbert and Lolita meet on the road are similarly transient, belonging to a generic America rather than to a specific place. In open, unfamiliar territory, Humbert and Lolita form their own set of rules, where normal sexual and familial relationships become twisted and corrupt. Both Humbert and Lolita have become so disconnected from ordinary society that neither can fully recognize how morally depraved their actions are. Humbert cannot see his own monstrosity, and Lolita shows only occasional awareness of herself of a victim.

Though Humbert sweeps Lolita away so that they can find a measure of freedom, their exile ultimately traps them. Lolita is bound to Humbert because she has nowhere else to go, and though Humbert dreams of leaving America with Lolita, he eventually accepts that he will stay in America until he dies. Though each of them undergoes one final exile, Lolita to Dick Schiller and Humbert to prison, it is clear that they are first and foremost exiled from their own selves, an exile so total that they could never return to their original places in the worlds they once left. Exile in Lolita is tragic and permanent.

Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Butterflies

Images of and references to butterflies and lepidopterology, the study of butterflies and moths, appear throughout the novel, emphasizing not only the physical similarities between the fragile insect and young Lolita but also the distant and clinical way in which Humbert views his lovely prey. He effectively studies, captures, and pins them down, destroying the very delicate, living quality he so adores. Virtually every time Humbert describes a nymphet, he uses such terms as frail, fragile, supple, silky, or fairy-like, all of which could just as easily describe butterflies. Like butterflies, nymphets are elusive, becoming ordinary teenagers in the blink of an eye. Lolita, in particular, undergoes a significant metamorphosis, changing from innocent girl-child to exhausted wife and mother-to-be. Next to such delicate and mercurial creatures, Humbert becomes aware of his own monstrosity, often referring to himself as a lumbering brute.

Doubles Quilty is Humberts double in the novel and represents Humberts darker side. Humbert is evil in many ways, but Quilty is more evil, and his presence suggests that the line between good and evil is blurred rather than distinct. Humbert and Quilty seem near opposites for much of the novel. Humbert adores and worships Lolita, while Quilty uses and ultimately abandons her. Humbert presents his own feelings for Lolita as tender and Quiltys as depraved. However, the men are more similar than different. Both are educated and literary. Both, of course, are pedophiles. Humbert sees himself as the force of good, avenging Lolitas corruption, yet he himself originally robbed Lolita of her innocence. By the end of the novel, Humbert and Quilty become even more closely identified with one another. When Humbert and Lolita play tennis one day, Humbert leaves to take a phone call, and Quilty sneaks in on the game to briefly become Lolitas partner. Lolita eventually leaves Humbert for Quilty, but her new life is hardly an improvement. When Humbert finally confronts Quilty, the men become one and the same as they struggle with each other. Humbert, describing their fight, says, We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. His jumbled use of the first-person and third-person plurals indicates that he and Quilty are no longer distinct from one another. The already blurred line between the two men has now disappeared entirely.

Games

Almost all the characters in Lolita engage in games. Sometimes they consist of innocent amusement, such as when Humbert tries to interest Lolita in tennis and dreams of making her a tennis star. Humbert also plays many silly games with Lolita to get her attention and to keep her compliant. This sense of play reinforces the fact that Lolita is still a child and that Humbert must constantly entertain her. Games also distract characters from more serious issues and allow them to hide sinister motives. Humbert and

Godin play chess so that they can pass the time without revealing their true selves. Quilty, in particular, plays word games with his hotel aliases, leaving puzzles for Humbert to decipher. The characters play games to hide the feelings they cannot reveal, to further their own ends, and to dissuade those who seek to discover the truth, including readers. Though the games start out as innocuous and childlike, they soon become deadly manipulations.

Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Theater The theater becomes a symbol of artifice and artistry in Lolita. Humbert blames Lolitas newfound ability to lie on her experience in the school play. Quilty uses the same school play to bring Lolita to him, and Lolita is awed by the theater because of Quiltys influence. This is particularly poignant for Humbert, as he himself was never able to interest Lolita in any artistic endeavors. Ultimately, Lolita itself can be seen as a marvel of stagecraft: using language, theater requires an audience to willingly suspend its collective disbelief, in order to place themselves imaginatively in the world of the play. Like a theater audience, a reader may be aware of the craft and artifice involved in the narratives construction, but he or she nonetheless becomes a willing participant in the illusion. This involvement takes on a darker tone for the reader of Lolita, as the force of Nabokovs artistry manages to make an incestuous pedophile not only understandable but also oddly sympathetic. Prison Even though Humbert writes Lolita from his prison cell, his confinement begins long before his murder of Quilty. From the moment he loses Annabel and realizes that he worships nymphets, Humbert understands that he is in a prison of his own making. He knows that his proclivities are forbidden by society, so he must put forth a respectable faade and hide his true desires. Nabokov also uses the concept of the prison metaphorically to symbolizeHumberts secret self. Humbert is initially imprisoned by his secret love for nymphets, then by his love for Lolita. By the end of the novel, however, Humbert has completely flouted all of societys rules and thus escapes from his confinement. At that moment, though his body languishes in a real, physical prison, he finds himself free of the prison of respectability, and can thus revealand revel inhis true self for the first time. The prison, paradoxically, becomes a symbol of his psychological freedom.

Major Themes The power and beauty of language The most noticeable feature of Lolita, and the main reason for its staying power, is Humbert Humbert's gorgeous, tricky, and delightful prose. Nabokov's primary motivation for writing so beautifully is to plunge the reader into a state of "'aesthetic bliss.'" Lolita is as pleasurable a reading experience as any novel, and for what is ostensibly a mystery story, it demands a rereading largely on the basis of its beautiful writing. Humbert's language is enchanting, and the motif of enchantment and fairy tales runs throughout the novel; indeed, Nabokov believed that all stories should resemble fairy tales, and the storyteller should be a kind of enchanter. In addition to this blissful enchantment, the language of Lolita has a number of other effects. Inherent in this aesthetic bliss is a freezing of time. When Humbert describes Lolita playing tennis in minute detail, he succeeds in locking her into eternal nymphet-hood. Every time he revisits her through prose, she attains the specificity of her image in his memory. Humbert also diverts the reader from his ugly actions with his pretty words. But he goes beyond mere prettiness; his constant wordplay and verbal games force us to concentrate on language rather than on him. Nabokov also subverts the mystery genre by using language as the main dispenser of clues, rather than action. While some of the verbal acrobatics are merely for entertainment, the flood of allusions often reveals clues to Quilty's identity and Humbert's character. Obsessive desires Far less a mystery than a love story, Lolita concerns itself with Humbert's obsessive drive for sex, in Part One, and violence, in Part Two. The two passions oppose each other, as sex creates life and violence brings it to an end. They are not exclusive to the first and second part, of course; Humbert frequently wants to kill Haze in Part One, as he wanted to kill his first wife Valeria, and his lust does not diminish in Part Two. Humbert usually gets what he wants - he beds Lolita, Haze dies, and he kills Quilty. However, some of his desires are impossible to achieve, namely his wish for nymphets never to grow up. Inevitably, he loses his hold on Lolita as she ages and develops independent desires (among them, as he finds out later, love for Quilty). Madness often ensues, a condition Humbert has a history of, as when Valeria cheated on him. He occasionally concedes his insanity and calls himself a "madman." Humbert also releases these unsatisfied desires through other forms; he cries several times in the novel in Lolita's presence, and even does so during intercourse. McFate Humbert uses the word "McFate" to describe the numerous coincidences in life which suggest a series of fated checkpoints through which he must pass. For instance, the number 342 recurs as Haze's home

address, as their room number at The Enchanted Hunter, and in the number of hotels at which they stay. Dogs also pop up at several key moments, notably when Haze is run over by a driver trying to avoid a neighborhood dog. Another possibility other than the fated checkpoints is that Humbert has authored these coincidences from his jail cell, changing real events around to fit his whims as an unreliable narrator. Reader as jury Since Nabokov believes fiction should not be moral, but only aesthetic, he mocks our tendency to make moral judgments by having Humbert address his readers as jury members and judges. However, this explanation obscures a complicated investigation into morality, fate, and free will. Humbert attempts to remove moral responsibility for his actions by subscribing to a philosophy of fate; if he is not in charge of events, then he cannot be held liable for them. By the end of the novel, however, he admits he exercised free will in his abuse of Lolita and deserves some kind of punishment. Still, he does not believe capital punishment or even jail serves up the degree of suffering he has inflicted upon himself by losing Lolita. Europe vs. the Unites States While Nabokov denied his novel was in any way an allegory of the culture clash between Old Europe (represented by Humbert) and Young America (represented by Lolita), the reader can extract much about America from their relationship. Haze can be viewed as a symbol of bourgeois America; hopelessly striving toward European elegance, she is instead stuck in American middle-class kitsch. Lolita, too, is entrenched in American popular culture. Her attraction to lowbrow film, especially, draws Humbert's attention. In a sense, Lolita's emphasis on prose and subjective vision is a reaction to the objective, visual language of film, and renders itself virtually unfilmable (although two respected versions of Lolita have been filmed). Humbert's European ear also revises American idiom to humorous or even logical effect (consider his phrase "west-door neighbor"). Parody of Doppelgnger tale The Doppelgnger tale, a story that involves characters who "double" and oppose each other (Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde epitomizes this), receives much parody and revision from Nabokov, who once called the Doppelgnger a "'frightful bore.'" Names in the novel are themselves doubles, especially Humbert Humbert, whose double name contains linguistic allusions to the words "man" and "shade" (shadows form another motif in the novel and are traditional symbols for doubles). The major double is between Humbert and Quilty, as befits the protagonist and antagonist. However, Quilty is much like Humbert, a suave, literary pedophile, and they even reverse position as hunter and hunted. Nabokov effaces the differences between the two supposed opposites and reveals their similarities. Nabokov's parody, then, is not simply a literary subversion, but an examination into the gray area of morality.

Finally, mirrors throughout the novel create double images but, in line with the false Humbert/Quilty double, they often simply magnify a single character. This magnification suggests the solipsism (the belief that the self is the only existent thing) from which the characters, especially lonely Humbert, cannot escape. Butterflies Nabokov was a highly respected lepidopterist (specialist in butterflies), and if anything in Lolita can be viewed as a strict symbol (a technique Nabokov disdained), it is Lolita as a butterfly. She is elusive and beautiful and Humbert hunts her like the lepidopterist does with his net. However, she also goes through a metamorphosis that Humbert tries to stop - since the metamorphosis seems to occur in reverse. Rather than change from a disgusting larva to a gorgeous winged creature, Lolita seems to get more vulgar as she ages and loses her nymphet powers (especially by the end of the novel). Mockery of psychoanalysis Nabokov is a harsh critic of Sigmund Freud and the entire field of psychoanalysis, and Humbert is his proxy mocker throughout Lolita. He derides the idea that Annabel was the traumatic motivation for his love for Lolita, and makes jest of many other psychoanalytic clichs, such as the gun symbolizing the phallus.

About Lolita Vladimir Nabokov started writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell University in 1949. He continued writing the novel while traveling with his wife around the country on summer butterfly hunting trips (Nabokov was an esteemed lepidopterist, or butterfly specialist), and completed the novel in 1954. Publishers were predictably skittish about a story narrated by a pedophile, and it did not find its way into European print until 1955 (it was published in America in 1958). Controversy over the subject matter only inspired a wider readership; sales of the critically-acclaimed book and a 1962 cinematic translation (directed by Stanley Kubrick) enabled Nabokov to retire from teaching and concentrate on writing in Montreaux, Switzerland, in 1960.

For all its hype as a sexual novel, Lolita is less concerned with physical, and more with verbal, eroticism. Nabokov maintained that "'sex as an institution'" bored him, and the salacious reader expecting a crassly graphic tale is in for disappointment; Humbert's overwhelming, turgid lust for Lolita soon turns into an overwhelming, tragic love. Limning all his desires is Nabokov's exquisite prose, making Lolita arguably one of the most beautiful books in the English language. Nabokov made his mark on English in

other ways, introducing two neologisms to English: "nymphet," to describe the young girls Humbert adores, and of course "Lolita," the paragon of this breed. Indeed, Nabokov preferred the notion that Lolita was "the record of my love affair with the?English language," rather than a record of his European views of America. Still, Lolita is a museum of 1950s America, from Lolita's bobby-sox adoration of popular movies to Charlotte Haze's bourgeois values. Regardless of what the reader takes from Lolita, it remains Nabokov's most popular novel with readers and scholars alike. It also remains controversial; a 1997 film version directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert had difficulty finding a theatrical release in the U.S.