Changes

I don't know if I'm just not reading the story as well as I did before, but I feel like this book is getting harder and harder for me to follow. Humbert Humbert's character just seems to be aimless in all the things he is saying and it's hard for me to grasp everything that is going on here, but I try to at least grasp onto a little bit of what he's saying.

I feel like Humbert and Dolly/Lolita are going through dramatic changes as characters. Lolita is becoming a complete smartass and for some reason Humbert just takes it. She's becoming much more of a woman always talking back to Humbert and treating him like a father. What has been confusing me this entire time is why Humbert is still attracted to her? I mean isn't he a pedophile? So wouldn't he want a girl who was more childish looking? Lolita is becoming more of a woman, but for some reason Humbert still loves her. In fact, he's so crazy about her that he even begs her sometimes to just look at him. He says on page 192, ". . . I would dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride--and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita." All she responds to this is, "For Christ's sake leave me alone." I feel like Humbert is still going through the internal conflict of being a father to Lolita and all the roles that come with rearing a teenager but then also being completely attracted to her at the same time.

A part of this section that I truly enjoyed was Lolita's little scheming to get money out of Humbert, although basically the way she was doing it was by prostituting herself. I just thought it was witty of her to up the price for her sexual favors because she knew that Humbert wanted her and would pay anything to get it. This is another example of her independent spirit and her maturation process, she's definitely a conniving girl. Also, boys are starting to be interested in her, which Humbert simply cannot deal with. He won't let her go on any dates and she get's so mad because she feels that she's being deprived of a right. In this section, I completely sympathized with Lolita because my parents were SUPER strict about dating and it caused MANY rifts in our household as we'd fight over it. I can see how this definitely would have put even more of a rebellious streak in Lolita because she just wants to be independent and this point in her life. It probably sparked many of the other things she does to Humbert just to spite him for the rules he has on her (for instance when she sleeps with the man that has a pregnant wife). She is SO promiscuous!

I was a little confused by the meeting Humbert had with Pratt. They were talking about Dolly and how she seemed to be stuck in her Freudian sexual stages. That she didn't seem to be interested in anything sexual, but then she would tease other girls who were not as experienced as her? I just didn't understand why in the world an administrator of a school would call a stepfather in to talk to him about this, espeically in the 1950s, I mean wasn't this taboo back then? Maybe this is another example of our narrator being unreliable.

Another question I have while reading this is why Humbert stays in the United States with Lolita. He's talked about crossing the Canadian and Mexican border, but he never does. "Actually i was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border--I was braver now than last year," is what he says on page 208 but they never do leave. It's almost like he wants to get caught eventually or else he would have fled the country with the child he kidnapped. I don't know...this is definitely an interesting story that keeps me on my feet.