Humble Humbert: I Think Not. A delusional, sick, middle aged man obsessed with a self created love for pre-pubescent girls he has namely dubbed nymphets. Right? Wrong, this is only the skin-deep image we are given of the main character in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Rather, He is a highly intelligent chess master who is constantly aware of his environment and is able to manipulate it with minute actions bringing him the results he desires. Humbert’s obsession for the opposite sex starts in chapters three and four when we are introduced to his first love - Annabel. As Humbert recalls his beloved nymphets, he talks of two kinds of visual memory pertaining to remembering a face. One that a person, with their eyes open, must recreate, piece by piece, taking little details of vivid moments in time and putting them all together. The other, an instant glimpse, as if a flash bulb goes off inside your head, and instinctively, an “objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors” appears “on the dark innerside of your eyelids” (Nabokov 11). I would like to expand on the latter of the two ideologies, saying that this image, the more one thinks about it, the clarity soon fades. The reasoning for this being emotional attachment, one’s mind begins to wander about things that occurred in the past. Perhaps why he isn’t looking at the face in real life right then, instead of picturing it in his imagination. These emotional ties to that person may be for various reasons, but those aren’t important, it is the depth of them that bears the significance. He remembers Lolita’s face in the second of the two ways because of the extreme feelings he had built up for her throughout the time he was with her. Humbert recalls Annabel’s face with the first method simply because she was his first. Not because of any serious feelings for her; at least compared to...
