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Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert.
- Vladimir Nabokov
- 1955
- Summary: Chapter 28
- Summary: Chapter 29
- Summary: Chapter 30
- Summary: Chapter 31
- Summary: Chapter 32
- Summary: Chapter 33
- Analysis
Humbert eagerly anticipates caressing the unconscious Lolita. He claims that he hadn’t planned on taking Lolita’s innocence or purity but merely wanted to fondle her while she slept. He admits that it should have been clear to him then that Lolita and Annabel were not the same, and that if he had known what pain and trouble would follow, he would h...
Humbert returns to the hotel room to find Lolita half awake. He climbs into bed with her but doesn’t make any advances. Anxious and excited, Humbert stays awake all night. In the morning, Lolita wakes up and nuzzles him as he feigns sleep. She asks him if he ever had sex as a youth. When Humbert says no, Lolita has sex with him. Humbert states that...
Humbert launches into a dreamy description of how he would repaint the Enchanted Hunters hotel in order to make the setting of his first encounter with Lolita a more natural, romantic one.
Humbert once again defends his actions as natural, using history as evidence. He notes that according to an old magazine in the prison library, a girl from the more temperate climates of America becomes mature in her twelfth year. He further reminds the reader, whom he calls his jury, that he wasn’t even Lolita’s first lover.
Lolita recounts her first sexual experiences. Astonished by Humbert’s naïveté, she tells him that many of her friends have already experimented sexually with one another. At summer camp, she used to stand guard while her friend Barbara and Charlie, the camp-mistress’s son, copulated in the bushes. Soon, Lolita’s curiosity led her to have sex with C...
Humbert buys Lolita many things in the town of Lepingville. In the hotel, they have separate rooms, and he can hear Lolita crying. Sometime in the night, she creeps into his bed because, as Humbert says, she has nowhere else to go.
As Humbert and Lolita’s relationship transforms into a blatantly sexual one, Humbert’s demonstrated duplicity and seductive skill with language should make us question whether we can fully trust his description of the affair. In particular, Humbert’s claim that Lolita seduced him, rather than the other way around, seems suspicious. Like many adoles...
Humbert claims that his feelings for Lolita are rooted in love, not lust, but his self-delusion prevents him from making this case convincingly. Alternately slavish and domineering, Humbert has little control over his feelings and impulses.
This quotation, which appears in the novel’s Foreword, reveals the fate that Humbert will ultimately succumb to after the events of the text conclude. The fact that he dies of a heart condition has symbolic implications as it suggests that his unyielding love for Lolita is so torturous that he cannot overcome it.
Humbert Humbert’s rich imagination leads him to not only solipsize Lolita but to infuse his narration with imaginary, fairytale-like elements. This also closely mirrors his strong sense of fate. This quality of Humbert is aided by Nabokov’s own machinations that more smoothly connect Humbert’s imaginative or artistic indulgences.
The narrator of Lolita. Humbert is a highly educated, mentally unstable, literarily gifted European man with an uncontrollable desire for young girls, whom he calls “ nymphets.” Humbert Humbert is extraordinarily charming, sarcastic, and seductive to both his readers and the other characters.
According to Humbert, he is downright irresistible, a positive hunk whose "gloomy good looks" always get him the girl, causing Lolita to swoon, Charlotte to love him passionately and possessively, and Jean Farlow to develop a teenage crush. Humbert the Sophisticate. Humbert is not just about looks.
