Style and interpretation
The novel is narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. The novel’s flamboyant style is characterized by double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser-used «faunlet». For Richard Rorty, in his interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a «monster of incuriosity», dramatizing «the particular form of cruelty about which Nabokov worried most – incuriosity» in that he is «exquisitely sensitive to everything which affects or provides expression for his own obsession, and entirely incurious about anything that affects anyone else.»
Nabokov, who famously decried social satire, novels with direct political messages, and those he considered «moralists», avoided providing any overt interpretations to his work. However, when prompted in a 1967 interview with: «Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry—to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing», he replied:
No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert–Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of «little girls»—not simply «young girls». Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and «sex kittens». Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his «aging mistress».
Nabokov described Humbert as «a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching'» later in the same interview. When asked about coming up with Humbert’s doubled name, he described it as «… a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.»
Critics have further noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, the novel gives very little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book’s narrator. Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes: «Not only is Lolita’s voice silenced, her point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader … since it is Humbert who tells the story … throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in Humbert’s feelings.» Similarly Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar write that the novel silences and objectifies Lolita. Christine Clegg notes that this is a recurring theme in criticism of the novel in the 1990s. Actor Brian Cox, who played Humbert in a 2009 one-man stage monologue based on the novel, stated that the novel is «not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It’s Lolita as a memory.» He concluded that a stage monologue would be truer to the book than any film could possibly be. Elizabeth Janeway, writing in The New York Times Book Review, holds: «Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.»
Clegg sees the novel’s non-disclosure of Lolita’s feelings as directly linked to the fact that her real name is Dolores and only Humbert refers to her as Lolita. Humbert also states he has effectively «solipsized» Lolita early in the novel. Eric Lemay writes:
The human child, the one noticed by non-nymphomaniacs, answers to other names, «Lo», «Lola», «Dolly», and, least alluring of all, «Dolores». «But in my arms,» asserts Humbert, «she was always Lolita.» And in his arms or out, «Lolita» was always the creation of Humbert’s craven self … The Siren-like Humbert sings a song of himself, to himself, and titles that self and that song «Lolita». … To transform Dolores into Lolita, to seal this sad adolescent within his musky self, Humbert must deny her her humanity.
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about a covert women’s reading group. In an NPR interview, Nafisi contrasts the sorrowful and seductive sides of Dolores/Lolita’s character. She notes: «Because her name is not Lolita, her real name is Dolores which, as you know, in Latin means dolour, so her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence, while Lolita becomes a sort of light-headed, seductive, and airy name. The Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time and in our culture here today we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl and the crassest interpretation of her.» Following Nafisi’s comments, the NPR interviewer, Madeleine Brand, lists as embodiments of the latter side of Lolita «the Long Island Lolita, Britney Spears, the Olsen twins, and Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.»
For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert’s solipsism and his erasure of Lolita’s independent identity. She writes: «Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature … To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own … Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses.»
One of the novel’s early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: «we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.»
In 1958, Dorothy Parker described the novel as «the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls» and Lolita as «a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered». In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies wrote that the theme of Lolita is «not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar.»
In his essay on Stalinism Koba the Dread, Martin Amis proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood (though Nabokov states in his afterword that he «detests symbols and allegories»). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. «Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies,» he says. «Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny.»
The term «Lolita» has been assimilated into popular culture as a description of a young girl who is «precociously seductive … without connotations of victimization». In Japan, the novel gave rise in the early 1980s to lolicon, a genre of fictional media in which young (or young-looking) girl characters appear in romantic or sexual contexts.
Unreliable narration
Literary critics and commentators almost universally regard Humbert as an unreliable narrator, although the nature of his unreliability is a matter of debate. The literary critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term «unreliable narrator» to describe a narrator whose ethical norms differ from those of the implied author. While Booth’s definition has served as the basis for most subsequent narratological analysis, some commentators have disregarded his definition to classify Humbert as unreliable based on the dishonesty of his character and motives.
Booth places Humbert in a literary tradition of unreliable narrators that is «full of traps for the unsuspecting reader, some of them not particularly harmful but some of them crippling or even fatal». Booth cites Trilling’s inability to decide whether or not Humbert’s final indictment of his own morality is to be taken seriously, and Trilling’s conclusion that «this ambiguity made the novel better, not worse» in its «ability to arouse uneasiness,» as evidence of irony’s literary triumph over «clarity and simplicity». For Booth, one of Lolita’s main appeals is «watching Humbert almost make a case for himself» as Nabokov gives him «full and unlimited control of the rhetorical resources». Booth trusts that «skilful and mature» readers will repudiate «Humbert’s blandishments», picking up on Nabokov’s ironies, clues and «dead giveaway» style, but many readers «will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends», unable to dissociate themselves «from a vicious center of consciousness presented … with all of the seductive self-justification of skilful rhetoric».
Literary scholar James Phelan notes that Booth’s commentary on Lolita served as a «flashpoint» for resistance from readers of the New Criticism school to Booth’s conception of fiction as rhetorical action. Booth acknowledges that Nabokov marks Humbert as unreliable while also complaining about Lolita’s morality; he considers the novel «delightful» and «profound», while also condemning Humbert’s actions in violating Lolita. Phelan addresses
