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Summary of Lolita
The manuscript by Humbert Humbert is an autobiography detailing his relationship with the underage Dolores Haze. The manuscript begins with H.H. describing his first love at age 13 on the coast of Riviera. There he met Annabel, a twelve-year-old girl he fell madly in love with. However, before they can consummate their love, she dies of Typhus. This background to the story provides a glimpse into the haunted mind of Humbert, who, as an adult, spent time in a mental hospital before becoming an English teacher.
Fig. 1 - Lolita is written in the form of a memoir by Humbert Humbert.
As the story progress, the reader learns about Humbert's obsession. He had been married to an adult woman before, but his sexual attraction to young girls, whom he calls nymphets, is obsessive. He leaves Europe behind and comes to the United States, where he lives in the home of Charlotte Haze in New England. Then his obsession with her daughter, Dolores, also known as Lolita, begins. In his journal, he confides his pedophilia yearnings and flirtations with Lolita, who remains entirely innocent. He observes her every move like a hawk, learning every detail about her.
Fig. 2 - Humbert comes to the United States and lives in Charlotte Haze's New England home.
Charlotte, however, has begun to fall in love with Humbert. Despite his hatred for her, he decides to marry Charlotte during the summer while Lolita is at camp. This way, he can stay close to Lolita for longer and even flirts with the idea of killing Charlotte. Later, Charlotte finds Humbert's journal full of despicable longings for her daughter and confronts him. Charlotte becomes so upset she storms out of the house and is hit by a car, killing her.
Humbert immediately goes to pick up Dolores from camp and takes her to a motel. He spins the narrative in the story and makes it seem that she seduced him into sleeping with her. Unable to return to Lolita's home, Humbert drives her around the country for almost a year, engaging in inappropriate behaviors with the underage Lolita. Lolita learns how to manipulate Humbert and throws tantrums whenever he tries to touch her. Before arriving at their destination of Beardsley College, Humbert suspects he is being followed.
Fig. 3 - Humbert takes Lolita all around the country for nearly a year against her wishes.
Lolita is enrolled at the school where she engages in normal childlike behavior, such as flirting with boys her age. Humbert becomes jealous and constrains her even more, eventually accusing her of secretive behavior and being unfaithful toward him. He pulls her out of school and continues to drag her around the country. Humbert begins to become suspicious once more that they are being followed. He even accuses Lolita of conspiring against him with the man following them. Around this time, Lolita becomes seriously ill.
Humbert knows he has to take her to the hospital. He drops her off, and when he comes to pick her up, an uncle has already picked her up. Humbert is furious and upset and spends the next two years searching for her everywhere. Unable to find her, he begins a relationship with Rita, an adult woman. One day, he receives a letter from Lolita. She tells him she's married and pregnant and she needs money.
Humbert's first thought is that she is married to her kidnapper and is determined that he will kill him. However, when Humbert finds Lolita, who is now 17 years old, she is married to someone else. The man who picked her up from the hospital was Clare Quilty, a playwright. Lolita admits to loving him, but he kicks her out. Lolita had refused to participate in Quilty's child orgy pornography.
After giving Lolita $4,000, he tracks down Quilty and kills him by shooting him over and over again. Humbert is arrested and sent to jail. While in jail, he writes his memoir, which he only wishes to publish after Lolita is dead. Lolita dies in childbirth, and the manuscript is sent to John Ray Jr., Ph.D., whom we met at the novel's beginning. Humbert dies in jail from heart failure.
Author of Lolita
Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov was born in 1899 in Imperial Russia and wrote nine novels while living in Berlin. After meeting his wife and moving to the United States in 1940, fleeing German forces, Nabokov began to reach international acclaim and prominence. He worked at Wellesley College as a resident lecturer before gaining a teaching position at Cornell University in 1959. During this time, he wrote Lolita while on a trip collecting butterflies in the American West. Nabokov reached great financial and critical success after the publication of Lolita. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Characters in Lolita
Lolita is not densely populated with key characters, but the characters involved are critical to the story. Each character plays an important role in the plot and development of the novel.
Humbert Humbert (H.H)
Humbert Humbert is the protagonist of Lolita. He is also the narrator, and the story is told from his first-person point of view. His history of mental illness and sexual infatuation with young girls leads Humbert to engage in pedophilic behaviors with the young Dolores Haze. He is the sole reason for his downfall and the ruin of Dolores's childhood. His despicable and disgusting actions are written in beautiful language, which he says is a gift for the reader. Nabokov uses language from the point of view of Humbert to show how persuasive, beautiful language can nearly cause a reader to sympathize with a criminal character.
Dolores Haze, or Lolita
Dolores Haze is a young girl who, until meeting Humbert, is a normal kid. However, Humbert characterizes her as a seductive, flirtatious, and manipulative girl competing with her mother for Humbert's affection. This, of course, may not be entirely true as the story is told by Humbert, who is an unreliable narrator.
The unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is brought into question and whose rendition of events may not be entirely trustworthy. An unreliable narrator tells the story from the first person point of view and fails to include other perspective's in their rendition of events.
Dolores loses her childhood because of Humbert Humbert. After being taken from the hospital, Dolores enters into a bad relationship with Quilty, who leaves her. She dies before reaching adulthood from childbirth.
Charlotte Haze
Charlotte is the mother of Dolores and becomes Humbert's wife. She has a tense relationship with Lolita, which becomes even more strained after the appearance of Humbert. Charlotte aspires to be cultured, but she never reaches the elegance of the other housewives. Humbert depicts her as a nuisance and in the way of his true love, Lolita. She discovers Humbert's journal and his pedophilia. In a rage, she storms out and is hit by a car, after which she dies.
Annabel Leigh
Annabel was Humbert's childhood love who was unable to fulfill his physical desire for her because she dies of Typhus. Humber believes that her death and his unfulfilled longings lead him to an obsession with young girls, culminating in his relationship with Lolita. Annabel is represented as a catalyst for Humbert's disgusting behavior with underage girls.
Analysis of Lolita
Lolita is considered a literary masterpiece for its masterful use of language and persuasion. Here is an in-depth analysis of Lolita that will go over all the critical details you'll need to know about the novel.
Point of View
Lolita is written as a memoir and autobiography of Humbert Humbert. This being the case, the story is told from the first-person point of view of an unreliable narrator.
The best way to identify an unreliable narrator is to see both the intertextual and extra-textual contexts. If the narrator, like Humbert, contradicts themselves, admits to lying, or has gaps in their story, it is a clue that they are unreliable. In addition, if the logic used by the narrator differs from the common knowledge and logic of readers, it is also a sign the narrator is unreliable.
Humbert's perspective is a plea for sympathy from the reader. He claims to be a cultured European gentleman, but his actions say otherwise.
Writing Style, Literary Techniques, and Literary Devices
The writing style in Lolita is poetic and rich, with a focus on sounds, wordplay, and aesthetics of beauty. Humbert describes his despicable actions beneath a veil of an artist describing his artwork. By writing in this way, Humbert is a manipulative character trying to disguise the dark reality of his evil ways under a mask of beauty and poetry.
Fig. 4 - The writing style in Lolita is poetic, rich, and beautiful.
There are a few literary devices and techniques Nabokov employs to create poetic language, namely the use of wordplay and euphemisms, repetition, and alliteration. Nabokov also uses strong imagery to describe scenes and actions. This plays into the main theme of the novel, which is the aesthetics and power of beautiful language that can persuade, manipulate, and garner sympathy for a character who does not deserve it.
Alliteration is the repetition of a letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words.
Employing these literary techniques allows Nabokov to create a rhythmic language that is manipulative and ambiguous, mirroring the thoughts of Humbert.
And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country, that, by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep," (Part 2, Chapter 3).
This quote is an example of Nabokov's writing style in Lolita. In this long sentence, a series of literary devices, techniques, and imagery is crammed into a rhythmic description of Humbert and Lolita's trip around the United States. "A sinuous trail of slime" is an example of alliteration with the repetition of the soft s sound in the words sinuous and slime.
Imagery such as "dog-eared maps," "ruined tour books," and "old tires" evoke a sense of fatigue and exhaustion from such a journey. The descriptions of Lolita's nightly sobs also evoke her exhaustion and torment from the evil situation Humbert placed her in. Here, the reader can see through Humbert's manipulations that Lolita is not an active participant in his plans.
Quotes from Lolita
Here are some quotes from Lolita that will give you a better understanding of the text.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My soul, my sin. 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," (Part 1, Chapter 1).
These are the opening lines of Humbert's memoir and are an example of Nabokov's writing style. In these few sentences alone, alliteration is used many times to create a rhythm and focus on the sounds of the words. Examples of alliteration include "Lolita, light of my life," "My soul, my sin," and "tip of the tongue taking a trip."
There is a focus on the L, soft S, and hard T sounds. Imagery is also used to describe how it feels and sounds to say the name Lolita revealing Humbert's attachment to the sensuous world of language. By describing how it feels on the tongue and the steps the tongue takes to produce the name Lolita, the reader is introduced to the analytical, poetical world of Humbert.
In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards," (Part 1, Chapter 4).
In this particular scene, Humbert is describing the setting for the place where he and Anabel fell in love. The description of the setting reflects the emotional world of the two adolescents as they discover the physical aspects of their relationship.
The mimosa grove is described as nervous and slender. The nervousness is felt between the two as they are doing something in secret and for the first time, and the slenderness is about their young age. The arabesque windows, which are lit, hint at the potential eyes that may notice the two in the grove engaging in adult-like behavior. The scene has a dreamy quality, revealing that Humbert romanticizes this part of his life.
In this scene, Humbert thinks of what to do once he finds the love letter addressed to him from Charlotte Haze. He is in misery until he comes up with a plan that will bring him closer to Lolita. He mentions a Dostoevskian grin, referencing the Russian author.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist known for his novel, Crime and Punishment (1866). In the novel, Raskolnikov commits murder which he tries to convince himself is justified. Throughout the novel, the reader is introduced to the inner torment of the criminal as he tries to see a sense of morality in his actions. There are similarities between the character of Humbert Humbert and Raskolnikov, as Crime and Punishment served as inspiration for Lolita.
Here, the reader is introduced to the disturbing and manipulative mind of Humbert Humbert. In this way, the reader is brought closer to understanding the way Humbert thinks. By doing this, Nabokov is appealing to the sympathetic part of his readers, who may be manipulated into going along with Humbert's thought processes. This reveals Nabokov's masterful ability at the art of persuasion.
Lolita - Key takeaways
- Lolita was written by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov in 1955.
- Lolita is written in the form of an autobiographical memoir by Humbert Humbert, a European man who comes to America and becomes infatuated with the underage Dolores Haze.
- Lolita shows the inner world and thoughts of a pedophile and how he tries to win the sympathy of his readers despite his despicable actions.
- Lolita is told from the first-person point of view and contains an unreliable narrator, as well as includes many literary devices and techniques such as alliteration, repetition, and vivid imagery.
- Lolita is written in rich, poetic language that is beautiful, persuasive, and manipulative.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Lolita
When was Lolita written?
Lolita was written in 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov.
Who wrote Lolita?
Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov.
What is Lolita about?
Lolita is about Humbert Humbert's infatuation with the young Dolores Haze and the lengths he goes to make her his own. In the novel, the downfall of Humbert and his destruction of Dolores's childhood is evident.
What is the main theme of Lolita?
Lolita contains the main theme of the aesthetics and power of beautiful language.
Why is Lolita such an important book?
Lolita is an important book because of its masterful use of the English language.
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