Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Prose Flashcards
Humbert has a love for girls aged between the “limits of nine and fourteen” that “bewitch” people. He calls them…
“Nymphets”
Humbert’s physical obsession with Lolita. She is the source of all his happiness, who he is; yet she is also his “sin”, a forbidden fruit that he cannot have.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
Humbert is a very intellectual man - he finds Lolita, a young girl, unstimulating.
“Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz… gooey fudge sundaes… these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things.”
Humbert has such a strong passion for Lolita physically that he wants to turn her inside out and kiss her organs… :/
“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart”
Lolita is written through the 1st person with Humbert narrating. It is formed as his memoir and, as he is writing before his death, he claims this is the only way they will stay bound forever.
“This is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
Humbert is confused, kidding himself that Lolita was the one that seduced him, whereas in fact he raped her.
“I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.”
Humbert feels remorse for his actions afterwards. Guilty.
“This was a lone child… with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning.”
Humbert is constantly very self-deprecating and degrading throughout - a technique he employs to try and get sympathy from the reader and persuade them of his opinions. He does assert how much he loves Lolita though - also doing so in French, once again showing his intellectuality.
“Heavy-limbed, foul-smelling”
“I was a pentapod monster… I was despicable, and brutal… mais je t’aimais!”
Humbert is an unreliable narrator and fully admits it, as well as his other crimes.
“Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you”
Humbert talks directly to the reader, likening them to a “jury”, as if he is being judged for his crimes but also to make himself seem more helpless and therefore easier to sympathise with.
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury.”
Humbert’s first love - Annabel - when he was young was an unfulfilled one, perhaps being the cause for his obsession with girls of that age in his later life.
“I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling… four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”
Humbert describes a nymphet.
“The slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb”
