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Sacrifice In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

759 Words4 Pages

When stripped of all its superfluous literary qualities, Lolita is a tragic story of the brutalities that fall upon Dolores Haze, the juvenile temptress of Humbert Humbert. At just twelve years old, Dolores or Lolita as she is referred is raped by her step-father. If this were an episode of Law and Order, the case would be closed and Humbert would be put away. However, because Humbert is the narrator, and thus chronicles the actions of the novel, he is able to manipulate the reader’s perception of the incidents to diminish the blow of the crime. While he claims that his nymphet addiction is never about sex, by describing the subject and the object as artistic projections, the “moral significance of the abuser’s deeds is blurred or even vanishes completely,” an important factor for Humbert as he wants us, his jury, not to convict him for his sins (Marcus). Subconsciously, the reader is completely unaware of the atrocities Humbert commits, yet we pay little mind to the, as he presents them in such a way that we feel guilt that Lolita does not give him the love he …show more content…

By the second part of the novel, he and Lolita have already reached the climax of their relationship. In order to preserve the frailty of Lolita’s nymphet qualities, Humbert withholds blunt sexual terms, instead describing the act using natural imagery like “a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise” or “a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool” (Nabokov, 134-135). To him, what he and Lolita just committed was an act of love, but with no available commentary from Lolita, it is hard to believe that this was anything beautiful but rather another figment of Humbert’s dwindling imagination. A careful craftsman of words, Humbert nimbly addresses a myriad of controversial issues while ultimately playing mind games with the reader to avoid a judgement based in

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