It is very clear that he can be much more dark and scheming than he seems to be. That is illustrated by just how far he will go to possess Lolita - marrying her mother and then literally abducting her after her mother dies.
In addition, they both are tragic figures who never get what they really want. Humbert discovers he is capable of love, and that he loves Lolita, even when she is "passed her prime" at 17. He says to himself, "[a]nd I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imaged on earth, or hoped for anywhere else" (Nabokov 279). Humbert is capable of real love, or as real as it can be for him, at least, while Quilty seems to be an incarnation of the devil, an evil presence in both Humbert and Lolita's lives.
This evil is illustrated by his address, "Grimm Drive," and the nonchalant way he treats Humbert, even after he threatens to kill him. They become one at the end of the novel, indicating that without Lolita, neither of them are whole or complete, and so they have to meld together with their similarities to even survive. Nabokov writes, "He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us" (Nabokov 301). The two characters become indistinguishable,...
Freud in Lolita The narrator of Vladimir Nabakov's novel Lolita, Professor Humbert, begins his story by recounting his childhood and the early stages of his sexual life, and particularly his experiences with his first love (or at least, his first obsession), a young girl named Annabel Leigh. Humbert recalls their sexual (mis)adventures together in some detail, and his description of this childhood romance closely echoes Sigmund Freud's formulation of the "infantile
pervasive philosophies behind many postmodern forms of art and literature is the idea that human identities are defined more by their social circumstances than by any universal truths. The human is not a self-sufficient entity, but is built through social conventions. This notion reveals itself in the transitional postmodern works by Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov -- specifically, in Lolita and Waiting for Godot. Humbert is continually attempting to
fool's love in Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki Naomi (1924) by the 20th century Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki has often been anachronistically called the Japanese Lolita in that it relates the obsession of a middle-aged man for a much younger woman. (Nabokov's novel was published in the 1950s). Tanizaki's male protagonist Joji is somewhat younger than Nabokov's Humbert and the female heroine Joji is somewhat older (although still a teenager) than
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