60 pages • 2 hours read
Vladimir NabokovLolita
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Humbert Humbert
Humbert Humbert is the pseudonymous narrator of the novel. All aspects of the story, including his own descriptions of himself and others, are framed through his eyes. According to himself, he is smart, well-read, charming, good-looking, and good at remembering things. Humbert is suspicious of psychiatry as a field. He believes it is reductive and that psychiatrists are easily manipulated; as such, he enjoys toying with them.
Humbert’s unconsummated love affair with Annabel Leigh as a boy leads to his current and lifelong obsession with nymphets, or young girls who are irresistibly sexually attractive to men. The narcissistic aspects of his personality give him a heightened belief in his own abilities to charm others around him, and he regularly brags about how well he can convince others of his lies.
Humbert enjoys wordplay, and he litters the text with puns, allusions, and humorous asides as well as criticisms of American life. Humbert routinely tries to justify his behavior with his erudition; he makes impassioned defenses of pedophilia by citing classical literature, history, and art.
Humbert is especially cruel toward women. Every woman in his life dies, and he dismisses almost all of their deaths in blunt, impersonal terms. His mother dies in a storm and Annabel Leigh, his first nymphet, of typhus. Valeria, his first wife, leaves him and is said to have died in America in an experiment. Charlotte Haze, whom Humbert marries only for access to Lolita, dies as a result of Humbert’s actions. Rita does not die, but he abandons her with a note. Humbert wants control over these women, and when they are dead, they no longer interest him because he no longer needs to control them.
Dolores “Lolita” Haze
When Humbert first meets Lolita, she is twelve years old, and he is astonished to see her resemblance to Annabel Leigh. As a child, she is flirty and precocious, competing with Charlotte, her mother, for Humbert’s affections. As she matures, she grows tired of Humbert and starts to prefer spending time with other children. Interested in the theater, Lolita begins rehearsing for the school play and learns how to deceive others. By the age of fourteen, she is able to plot her escape from Humbert, but, lonely and damaged, she escapes Humbert only to find herself with Quilty, another man who takes advantage of her sexually.
Humbert tries to groom Lolita to appreciate art and culture, but she is too young for such mature interests. She prefers comic books, candy, and movies like musicals, underworld pictures, and Westerns. Musicals offer her an escape from the cruelty of her world, underworld or gangster pictures offer her excitement, and Westerns show the open landscapes through which she and Humbert drive, although she seems to not show much interest in anything they see on the road.
As an adolescent, Lolita is drawn to men who are much older than her and artistically inclined. Both Quilty and Humbert consider themselves writers and artists, and Quilty wants her to be an actress. Lolita, in the end, marries Dick, a seemingly simple, kind person.
Names have significance in Lolita in part because all of them are pseudonyms created by Humbert. Lolita’s given name, Dolores Haze, suggests that her life is one of sorrow and distress; her first name is a homophone for “dolorous” while her last name is a word that describes something indistinct.
Charlotte Haze
Charlotte is Lolita’s mother and the owner of the house in which Humbert rents a room. She reveals her love for Humbert in a melodramatic letter that Humbert mocks before he recognizes that marrying her will allow him access to Lolita. Charlotte is middle-aged and middle-class, and Humbert criticizes her middlebrow taste throughout the book. She dies trying to send letters she writes after finding proof of Humbert’s obsession with Lolita in his diary.
Charlotte is obsessed with a poetic notion of love and passion, and she is concerned primarily with Humbert’s affection. She adores the attention she receives as Humbert’s wife, seemingly preferring it to the experience of actually loving him. Charlotte shares a number of qualities with her new husband: Both are melodramatic, both want to be loved, and both are selfish. When Charlotte throws Humbert out, she does so because she has been hurt by Humbert’s diary entries; she feels no fear or concern for her daughter, whom she calls a “miserable brat.”
Charlotte’s name suggests that Humbert thinks of her as a “charlatan” or a phony, and her airs reinforce this idea. For instance, she calls her backyard a “piazza” as though her house is a courtly home in Europe. She seeks to move in the world of art and culture, and she looks past two men who are interested in her daughter sexually in part because they seem cultured and sophisticated. After her marriage to Humbert, she is obsessed with redecorating the house, and Humbert criticizes her for her tacky ideas of domesticity. He also makes fun of the way she uses French phrases while mispronouncing the words. To Humbert, Charlotte represents the misguided, phony culture of America.
Clare Quilty
Quilty is the playwright who follows Humbert and Lolita across the country and helps her escape from Humbert. The nephew of Ivor Quilty, the Ramsdale dentist, Quilty has known Lolita for years. In the past, he has nearly been put in jail for his pedophilia. Lolita has had a crush on Quilty for years, as the photograph of him in room indicates. Lolita calls Quilty the love of her life, but by the time Humbert meets him, he seems to be a drug addict who spends his days in debauched decadence.
Quilty is Humbert’s shadowy double, whom Humbert resembles and eventually refers to as his brother. Humbert meets Quilty for the first time at the Enchanted Hunters, where Quilty indicates that he knows what Humbert is doing with Lolita. Later, Humbert sees Quilty’s tuxedo jacket in a theater in Utah, again obscured by shadows. The rest of the time, Humbert sees only Quilty’s reflection in the rearview mirror of his car.
Like Humbert, Quilty is a pedophile who often employs puns and allusions in his speech. Quilty’s perversions are darker than Humbert’s; for example, Quilty asks Lolita to engage in sexually devious acts that horrify Humbert for, unlike Quilty, Humbert loves Lolita. Quilty is the dark reflection of Humbert and a driving force for Humbert after Lolita leaves; Humbert’s obsession with finding Quilty propels the action in the second half of the novel.
Quilty is the answer to many of the great mysteries and coincidences in the book. When Humbert kills Quilty, Humbert feels he has been set up as a character in one of Quilty’s plays. Quilty is a writer, and he create parts of Lolita’s character according to his own desires, which leads Humbert to wonder if his desire for vengeance is merely an inevitability. Killing Quilty feels unsatisfactory to Humbert, perhaps because he is killing an aspect of himself, metaphorically speaking.
Related Titles
By Vladimir Nabokov
