LOLITA

1. NARRATION AND ADDRESS

A. Direct address
i.

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to

replay; I want them to examine its detail and see for themselves
how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed
with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had,
impartial sympathy. So let us get started. I have a difficult job
before.

B. Address to the gentlemen of the jury

i.

Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury! //And she was mine, she was
mine, the key was in my fist. (125)

ii.

31: I have but followed nature. I am natures faithful hound. Why

then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her
flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first
lover. (135)

C. Address to Lolita at the end

i.

Thu, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But
while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as
much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to ou from
here to Alaska.

2. PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA/INSANITY
A. Annabel Lee
B.
i.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer,
a certain initial girl-child.

3. LANGUAGE
A. Direct address
B. Encounters with Lolita

i.

Humbert

4. NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE

5. DUALITY (QUILTY) /INVOLUTION

A. Not clearly distinguishable
i.

I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled

over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. (II, 35, 299)

6. DEPICTION OF LOLITA
Lolita is purely an object of Humberts adoration/lust, she exists in the
readers mind as how Humbert wants us to see and experience her. He
is completely enthralled, the intensity of lust and love that she evokes
in him is reflected in the poeticism of the prose. She is depicted in such
a way that we forget that she is only an ordinary child. The poeticism
of the prose distorts the truth and the reader forgets the subjectivity in
which Lolita is described and we are unable to separate or distance
ourselves from the scene that Humbert has depicted, because were as
enthralled by Lolita just as Humbert is.
A. Opening passage
1. Lolita, light of life, fire of my loins.
2. Lola, the bobby soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit,
singing through its juice every movement she made, every
shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the
secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and
beauty
B. First encounter with her
He describes his gratification to a biblical extent.
1. What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost
roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that
state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found
elsewhere in conscious life
a. Now as opposed to his unsatisfied encounter with Annabel
Lee

2. For there was I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely

nymhet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and
slowly enveloped
ii.

Carmencita
1. (13, 62) (Drew his .32 automatic, I guess and put a bullet
through his molls eye)
2. (29, 280) Carmencita, lui demandais-je One last word, I
said in my horrible careful English, are you quite, quite sure
that-.you will not come live with me? I will create a brand
new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me
that microscopic hope (to that effect)
No, she said smiling, no.
It would have made all the difference, said Humbert
Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic I mean this is the kind of
fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even
occurred to me to do it.
3. Lolita had been safely solipsized
(14, 62) I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm
without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm
doneWhat I had madly possessed was not she, but my
own creation, another, fanciful Lolita perhaps more real
than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between
me and her, and having no will, no consciousness
indeed no life her own.

7. DEPICTION OF NORMAL WOMEN VS NYMPHETS

A. Terrestrial beings
(14, 62).
B.