MacKenzie Bernard
Lolita Literary Analysis
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the fictional narrative of Humbert Humbert, a middle aged hopeless
romantic passionately in love with Lolita, a 12-year-old girl. Humbert writes of his passion for Lolita
which, after he becomes her step-father, turns into a sexual relationship. Lolita eventually escapes from
him with Clare Quilty, another older man with a striking resemblance to Humbert. Three years after
losing Lolita, Humbert murders Quilty and ends up in the prison where he writes his memoir. Through
distinctively beautiful prose, Nabokov turns what might ordinarily be regarded as the disgusting musings
of a sexual psychopath into an engaging romance where Humbert comes off not as a disturbing
pedophile, but as an endearing protagonist. Through Humbert’s poetic spin on his eccentric love, Lolita
develops the idea that love is inevitably tragic, but at the same time, love (even a pedophile’s love) is
beautiful.
Lolita shows that love is a devastating, heartbreaking experience. Humbert comes to realize his
obsessive love led to tragedy not only for himself, but also for Lolita:
Nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be
proven to me – to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction –
that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores
Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can,
then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very
local palliative of articulate art (249).
It’s reasonable to assume that a relationship between a middle aged man and a 12-year-old girl
is going to result in emotional damage for the child. The pedophilic context of Humbert’s love was
bound to deprive Lolita of her childhood. “What I heard was but the melody of children at play […] and
then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence
of her voice from that concord (271).” Humbert realizes that his love robbed Lolita of her innocence and
ultimately caused just as much pain in her life as it did in his, if not more. In “’Lolita’ and the Dangers of
Fiction,” noting Humbert’s realization of the harm he’s done to Lolita, Mathew Winston claims:
He gradually learns that he knew nothing about her thoughts or feelings and, in fact, carefully
avoided any recognition of her personality which might interfere with the satisfaction of his own
physical and psychological needs. He is able to feel for the first time the full pathos of “her sobs
in the night—every night, every night.” He discovers, in short, that Dolores Haze is a person and
not a character (Winston).
Though Humbert is heartbroken, he realizes the damage he caused Lolita: “She groped for words. I
supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”) (245).” Humbert’s
uncontrollable love essentially ruined Lolita’s childhood. The deprivation of Lolita’s innocence shows just
one example of the tragedy that unavoidably results from love.
While Humbert acknowledges the damage his love caused Lolita, the ultimate focus of his
memoir is the tragedy love caused for him. Perhaps the biggest example of the tragedy in Humbert’s life
can be found in his statement “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style (3).”
Humbert’s jealousy-inspired murder of Clare Quilty led him to a life in prison, or what Humbert refers to
as “well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion (272).” While a prison sentence and being titled a murderer are
great losses, for Humbert the real tragedy is losing Lolita. Humbert ends his story with “And this is the
only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita (272).” Humbert isn’t concerned with having to deal
with a life in prison; his concern is living a life where his only way to Lolita is through his writing. He’s
heartbroken, and a well-heated prison can’t compare with that. Had Humbert not loved Lolita, or even if
he had not been driven to pedophilia at all, he might have had a happy, relatively normal life. “I grew, a
happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea
vistas and smiling faces (4).” Humbert’s happy childhood, and possibly happy life, was destroyed the
minute he met Annabel. From the moment Humbert fell “madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in
love (6)” with Annabel, Humbert was predestined to love Lolita “at first sight, at last sight, at ever and
ever sight (237).” “In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child (3).” Because he was fated to love Lolita, he was destined to lose her, murder
Quilty and ultimately live a miserable life not just because of his prison sentence, but because of the
incurable heartbreak that love rewarded him. From the loss of Lolita’s childhood, to Humbert’s prison
sentence, to every bit of sorrow underlying Humbert’s “fancy prose style (3)”, the tragedy evoked in
Lolita’s and Humbert’s lives shows the idea that love inevitably leads to agony.
While Lolita shows that love is catastrophic, Nabokov develops the theme that love is
simultaneously beautiful. Upon learning Humbert is a pedophile, it might normally be reasonable to
indict Humbert as nothing more than a disgustingly evil child molester. However, Humbert’s eloquent
narration makes his pedophilic love appear beautiful. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my
soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the
teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta (3).” Humbert’s introductory paragraph, charged with alliteration, assonance, and
metaphor, reads like poetry. In “Lolita: Overview,” Chester E. Eisinger writes:
The apparent subject of the novel is Humbert Humbert's perverted passion for a nymphet. But
we come closer to the real subject if we perceive that his passion is his prison and his pain, his
ecstasy and his madness. His release from the prison of his passion and the justification of his
perversion is in art, and that is the real subject of the novel: the pain of remembering,
organizing, and telling his story is a surrogate for the pain of his life and a means of transcending
and triumphing over it; art, as it transmutes the erotic experience, becomes the ultimate
experience in passion and madness (Eisinger).
As Eisinger claims, the “art” Humbert creates through his prose changes Lolita from a story about
pedophilia into a story about love. Because of Humbert’s style, it doesn’t matter that Lolita is 12 years
old. What matters is Humbert’s love, which he articulates in such a way that shows his love as being as
real and painful as any love he would have experienced had he been capable of loving someone
remotely close to his own age. No matter how appalling Humbert’s feelings may be, he still has the
ability to turn his love into something beautiful: “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you.
I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais (250-251).” Lolita is
not really about how horrible Humbert’s love is, but about how beautiful Humbert can make that love
appear. Eisinger further claims “The problem Nabokov deliberately sets for himself, however, is to
persuade the reader to transcend the erotic content and eschew moral judgment in order to perceive
his novel as an artistic creation and not as a reflection or interpretation of reality. Lolita is not immoral
or didactic, he has said; it has no moral. It is a work of art (Eisinger).” Lolita is not about what is morally
wrong with Humbert and Lolita’s relationship, but everything that’s artistically right with it. The love
story between a grown man and an adolescent girl should be downright disgusting, but no matter how
debauched Humbert and Lolita’s relationship is, Humbert manages to transform it into something
beautiful: “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 imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else (244).” Humbert’s
prose trumps the fact that Lolita is just a child. He can articulate his feelings as being poignant, even if
moral standards would argue that they shouldn’t be. Humbert’s poetic narration shows that love, even
in its most deplorable form, is beautiful.
On the surface, it might appear that Lolita is about little more than the repulsive life of a
pervert. But Nabokov’s prose turns Lolita into so much more. Lolita is a love story, and a tragic one at
that. Nabokov takes a pedophile, someone who should ordinarily be regarded as a despicable human
being, and turns him into a romantic, heartbroken poet. When Nabokov accomplishes that, the fact that
Lolita is only 12 years old isn’t important. What matters is the idea that love is a paradox, a beautiful
disaster. Love ruined the lives of both Humbert and Lolita, but their love story remains entrancing. Lolita
shows love as being an awful, heartbreaking experience that leads to absolute sorrow (even if that love
is the love of a pedophile) and, simultaneously, love, even pedophilic love, is beautiful (it might just take
Vladimir Nabokov to prove that). According to Lolita, it doesn’t matter the context of love. Whether love
is for a 12-year-old or a 112-year-old, if it’s real love, it will lead to inescapable, beautiful agony.
Works Cited:
Eisinger, Chester E. "Lolita: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed.
Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. The United States of America: The Olympia Press, 1955. Print
Winston, Mathew. "Lolita' and the Dangers of Fiction." Twentieth Century Literature 21.4 (Dec. 1975):
421-427. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 64.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Mar. 2013.