Lolita
LolitaNabokov’s Lolita is a book that deals with obsessive lust and
bloody violence, the real horrors of which are often masked by the
beautiful, clever language of the novel. Indeed, Humbert’s early job as a
perfume salesman mimics and evokes this masking and sweetening aspect
of language. Sudden, horrible death occurs frequently in Lolita, but the
book is better served if we study it as an experiment in language and the
way words are used to treat the book’s horrific subjects.
Identifying the sudden deaths of the work is not difficult. Beginning
with Humbert’s mother, whose famous death by “(picnic, lightning)” is
mentioned in Part One, we learn of the sudden if not unexpected deaths of
Annabel, Charlotte, and Quilty, and even those of Humbert and Lolita. We
also see lots of sudden loss in the novel, with Valeria’s surprising
announcement that she is having an affair and Lolita’s sudden disappearance
on the second road trip. Usually, the deaths are treated casually, as seen
most poignantly in the parenthetical mention of his mother’s death. Humbert
seems emotionally dissociated from many events in his life.
The sudden moments of great interest in the novel all indicate the
strong presence of fate and random chance. Charlotte is struck by pure
accident when a car swerves to avoid hitting a dog that happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. And Humbert’s loss of his mother to
lightning is nothing more than a random act of bad luck. The general
tendency of the novel is to indicate that, as Humbert himself points out,
chance is a major factor in life and in death; in some ways, this truth
diminishes the tragedy that accompanies loss, because we know that nature
is fickle and random.
Lolita can be viewed as a novel about sex and murder, but better
as a novel about the liberation of desire. Humbert is a man who essentially
gets what he wants in this book. He wants to get married at the beginning,
so he marries Valeria. He wants to make love to Lolita, so he marries
Charlotte to get near her and eventually succeeds. He wants revenge on
Quilty, so he murders him. In each part of the book, we see what Humbert
wants and how he goes about getting it. We learn in...
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