Dec 27, 2009

Lolita | Characters

As in many of Nabokov's novels, the cast of characters in Lolita is large, but its central players are relatively few. Humbert Humbert, the narrator, is a European expatriate, a self-described "nympholept" sexually obsessed with girls under the age of fourteen. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, an excruciatingly bourgeois but ultimately pathetic widow, and marries her in order to be near her daughter Dolores, whom he calls Lolita. Soon after, Charlotte is killed in an implausibly convenient car accident — a sort of parodic deus ex machina — leaving Humbert...