Angela+Nunez_+Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, //Lolita//, is a story that forces its readers to sympathize with and at the same time detest its main character, Humbert Humbert. The main reason why readers are moved to sympathize with Humbert, even though he is a criminal, is because he is telling this story from his perspective; making readers susceptible not only to his disgusting pedophilia, but also to his emotions and feelings of guilt and shame and regret, making him a rounded character who acknowledges his wrongs. As we read the novel, we are immediately and consciously being manipulated by Humbert to sympathize with him as he provides us with the history of his upbringing, his failures and bad luck in marriage, and his “uncontrollable” and guilty desires for children. Since we are so closely attached to the narrator as our only source of information, we naturally believe his account of the journey between him and Lolita, however, whenever we witness Humbert do something flat-out wrong, we realize we were siding all along with a pedophile/murderer. The main problem in the novel towards the end is that we want to forgive Humbert because he makes himself seem regretfully sorry for what he did to Lolita, yet we are only in possession of fragments of a story—we forget that we have only been given his account and not the accounts of other parties involved, including the main victim, Lolita. Although Humbert provides us with a depiction of Lolita throughout the novel, we cannot trust that Humbert is reliable and that his perception of her is of accurate telling. He himself even suggests that he didn’t know his Lolita completely when he says, “…it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate” (284). Every now and then we realize that Humbert is unreliable and he is controlling us by appealing to our emotions as his audience—he is playing us just as Lolita is depicted as playing him throughout the story. This novel is a perfect example of a framed-tale of dramas within dramas that are left incomplete. We know only what we are told from someone who is playing with us, making this entire novel very much like a movie. Nabokov is telling the overall story through Humbert, while Humbert is telling his story through his point-of-view, and we are left to "judge" or base our understanding of all the players in this novel from this warped character. For this reason, we continuously shift in our opinions of the main character whenever he shows his human/fragile side; such as when he seems truly repentent for his actions. Starting the novel (or opening the "play") by giving us his testimonial background (some of it, that is), was clever because Humbert immediately gets his audience to sense and “diagnose” him as a deprived child whose childhood was warped by the death of his mother and the absense of his father. With this information in the back of our minds, we justify reasons for Humbert’s actions and sickness with children, yet all the while, Nabokov consciously set-up the story in such a way as to gain our sympathy for Humbert. In many ways, Humbert is the puppeteer of this novel—the one who shows us which scenes are most important and which are not—making us, the victims of his manipulative babble. The last few chapters of Lolita are difficult to read without sympathizing for Humbert, especially because of the manner in which Lolita is depicted as the one who had always been in control of the situation. Humbert truly engages the reader in the emotional spiral that he— the villain, predator, and sick-man—was experiencing, however, this emotional spiral places the focus on Humbert, whereas in the beginning, the focus was on Lolita (the innocent child, the prey, the victim). This shift is very important to notice because Humbert victimizes himself and makes the reader see his victimization, which in turn, baffles and blurs our thoughts of Lolita as the victim and puts into question who is really guilty. Overall, Lolita’s character is too contrived by the narrator to say whether or not she was innocent or guilty of the sexual implications that Humbert associates with her, however, because of her age and our awareness of her single-parent home-life (mother and no father growing up), we know she is capable of demonstrating normal signs of fatherlessness. There is just as much of an emotional play with our sympathy for Lolita as there is for our sympathy toward Humbert. Since both of these characters are shown as having experienced abnormal childhood home-lives, the discrepancies in their characters is automatically associated with their upbringing, making it even more complicated to judge their wrongs because we associate their loss of a normal childhood with our rationale for their outbursts of wrong behaviors. Throughout //Lolita//, Nabokov's readers are placed over and over again in mortifying love-hate, right-wrong, innocent-guilty worlds of endless opposites that force emotional and heart-breaking realities to be exposed. At the end of the novel, Nabokov makes us face a jury-- where we have to react/respond to Humbert and at the same time our reactions show us who we are, what we believe in, and what we stand for. Just as Humbert exposes his beastly and vulnerable sides, we too, are forced to analyze the monsters that live within us, and suddenly, Humbert is not as much of a monster as we thought he was.