Characters

Lolita: Characters

Hi again, I'm back! I'm sure everyone is dying to hear about our own Humbert Humbert some more, so I'll cut right to the chase: this time, I'm going to be talking about the major characters in Lolita and the roles they play in the book, and I'm also going to do my best to provide some insight into these characters.

Like last time, I'll start off with some plot summary (and trust me, you're going to want to hear this). Humbert talks about his marriage with Charlotte Haze (Lolita's mom), and he grows more and more annoyed and angry as she continues to belittle her daughter Lo, of whom she's not a very big fan because of her attitude and unruliness. Humbert, obviously, has zero interest in Charlotte as a woman, but she is completely and utterly in love with him and tries very hard to be a good wife to him. When Charlotte expresses her wish that Lo go to boarding school, on the one hand tearing her away from Humbert and on the other getting her out of the way of Charlotte, it's basically the last straw for Humbert and he gets really angry (of course, though, he can't really express this for fear of betraying his attraction to his Lolita). Not long after, Charlotte finds Humbert's journal, in which he pretty stupidly talked about exactly how he feels about Lolita and describes his sexual attraction towards her. Charlotte (understandably, I'm sure) gets very angry and threatens to leave with Lolita, but then she is run over by a car. Of course, this could not have worked out better for Humbert: that pesky Charlotte was out of the way, and he could have Lolita all to himself. When Lolita returns from the summer camp she'd been attending, Humbert initially covers up her mother's death and takes her to a hotel. He drugs her, and when she is fast asleep that night, he is planning on...you know, but it doesn't end up happening until the morning, when she is wide awake. Lolita is super young, and in spite of her seemingly "devil-may-care" attitude, she doesn't really know what's happening or how to cope with what Humbert is doing to her body. Finally, Humbert tells her about her mother's death. As the two of them continue to travel from hotel to hotel, Humbert becomes more and more restrictive and jealous, and that brings me to the end of the section we just read.

There are four main characters in Lolita that I think that we know well enough to describe and analyze in a little more detail. The narrator of the novel is, obviously, Humbert Humbert, the (to be frank) really creepy, middle-aged man whose objects of sexual attraction are only young girls called "nymphets" between the ages of eight and thirteen. As I mentioned in my previous post, he was involved in a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old girl named Annabel when he himself was twelve, and since their attempts to have intercourse both failed, he has not moved on from being attracted to nymphets since then. The weirdest and yet most fascinating thing about Humbert is his ability to coerce the reader through the beautiful language he writes his story in into thinking he might be a pretty nice and approachable guy with only one minor flaw (a flaw that the book is based around). He is able to dance around a terrible event, like one of the many times he rapes Lolita, and make it sound not as horrifying and disgusting as it actually is. An example of this would be on page 142, when Humbert describes the scene after he broke the news to Lolita about her mother's death. He says, "At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go." The second main character in Lolita is Lolita herself, the bold, sassy and stubborn twelve-year-old girl whom Humbert "falls in love" with. When I was first reading, nothing about Lolita particularly stood out to me as anything other than the attributes of a normal twelve-year-old girl: gangly, freckled, foul-mouthed, and pop-culture-obsessed. The only reason Humbert is sexually attracted to her is because of what happened to him in his youth, and he considers Lolita to be a nymphet. Lolita's often flirtatious behavior toward Humbert in the beginning of the book surprised me before I realized how naive and inexperienced she is; she is quick to get in over her head, but by the time she comes to this realization, it's much too late, and Humbert has a firm hold on her. Because Lolita is so young when Humbert first enters the sexual relationship with her, I sincerely fear that he is going to strip her of any of her individuality and spirit over time, causing her to live every day just trying to get through the horrors she faces as a result of her captor's abnormal desires. Humbert's short-lived (literally and figuratively) wives, Valeria and Charlotte, played key roles in the story as well, but the latter was the one who was around long enough for us to get a good idea of her character. She is desperately in love with Humbert, but he does not care for her in the slightest. In fact, Humbert describes her in such a dispassionate and dismissive manner that the reader finds themselves ignoring any possible good qualities in her and even getting rather annoyed with her on Humbert's behalf when she interferes with his attempts to see and speak with Lolita. Charlotte is also a very cold mother; her blatant dislike for her obnoxious daughter is startling, and it also contributes to the reader not really liking her (after all, Lolita is the victim in this situation in pretty much every way). Even when Charlotte discovers Humbert's desired relationship with her daughter, her reaction is to call her a "miserable brat" on page 96, raging with jealousy and humiliation at this betrayal instead of immediately flying to protect her daughter against the pedophilic man fantasizing about her. This immediately showed me how selfish Charlotte was, only concerned about her relationship with Humbert and flying into a jealous rage when finding out it was built on a lie (I mean, getting upset at this horrifying kind of revelation is completely understandable, but to me, her fury was for all the wrong reasons).

Thanks for reading another one of my blog posts! I hope everyone is enjoying their free choice books as much as I'm enjoying reading Lolita! See you next time. Happy Friday!