Lolita- The View of a Pedophile

Lolita , a beautifully written novel by Vladimir Nabovok is also an eerie tale of a pedophile and his obsession. Humbert begins his memoiré by recounting his childhood and his first sexual experiences. Ironically the first sexual experiences he can remember are with a young American boy in the rose garden talking of “purely theoretical…pubertal surprises” (p11) After recounting these he goes on to his first love Annabel who was twelve when he was thirteen. He explains his sexual encounter with her in graphic, however beautiful detail. In the end though, Annabel and Hunmbert can’t finish their sexual experiences and 4 months later Annabel dies of Typhus.
Humbert becomes a pedophile after this, watching little girls and referring to those who catch his attention as “nymphets”. The referral to magic and spells is to discredit the psychological field and steers the explanation of Humbert away from being considered a pedophile and instead into that of a bewitched man. This is a frivolous attempt on Humbert’s side to clean up his image.
These “nymphets” that infatuate him are in fact 9-14 year old girls. He falls in love with Lolita, also known as Doris while taking a trip to America. His trip to America is his willful journey into exile. Humbert marry’s Lolita’s mother in order to stay close to Lolita, and when her mother dies he takes Lolita on a road trip where they become nomadic. Humbert and Lolita willfully exile themselves from any specific home.
Humbert is obsessed with these "nymphets" because of his unrequited love for Annabel, and he is still in the mind-frame of her twelve year old figure. He makes frivolous attempts at love but no woman can compare to Annabel, and until Lolita, his nymphets couldn’t fill his memory of her either.
Memory is another important aspect of the novel, Humbert recalls two types of memory and attributes the general memory to Annabel where he can “skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory” of his mind, and the more passionate, vivid memory is attributed to Lolita which is an “absolutely optical replica of a beloved face”.
Nevertheless, the novel captures the inner workings of a select pedophile’s mind and then shows how this man, H.H. justifies his feelings for young girls.