Part Two...Even More Interesting

I feel as this story is progressing I'm able to understand it a little bit more and more every time i pick it up. I was actually in a salon this weekend and brought the book with me to read as I was waiting and I ran into an apparent English 215 alumni who was asking me about the book. She too had read it and we were conversing about the complete strange aspects of the story, but agreed that it was quite well written. For instance, I've found a few passages that I read that I'm just amazed by Nabokov's language and am so jealous as a writer. He uses so many different techniques and vocabulary to just completely impress his readers, or at least it really impressed me. For instance on page 157, "Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushions of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters and retaliated in some comme on dit. Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various items of a scenic drive. . . " I just would never think to write this way, but the imagery he uses can be completely grotesque but also fabulous at other times too.

As a reader, we're beginning to see Lolita grow up into a sassy teenager. She's beginning to resent Humbert Humbert as a father and really wants to grow to be more independent. On one occasion she makes the remark, "how lond did I think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together and never behaving like ordinary people" (page 158). Also, when she's going to go out with her friends to I believe it was a roller skating rink, Humbert wants to come along but she swiftly informs him that it would not be cool or acceptable for him to join them. Humbert also feels like a failure as a father as well, which I think may play into this identity crisis he's having. He feels like he's failing Lolita in one sense (as her father) and basically has to threaten her to be his lover. It seems at some points he is quite ashamed of what he is doing and that he has had to sink as low as blackmail to keep her with him, but on the other side of things he is glad that she is still with him. Also, like most any man, his attention and complete and total affection is not only for Lolita, which is probably attributed to the fact that she's a brat to him most of the time. But whenever they go to a new town or city he admits to, "In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anet the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school, and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school--always a pretty sight" (page 161). So, as far as Humbert's problem is going, it is definitely not diminishing, if anything growing more intense. Because Lolita won't always give in to his sexual desires, he says, "how sweet it was to bring that coffee to her and then deny it until she had done her morning duty" (page 165). This man is definitely still quite sick, but can't understand why Lolita acts the way she does. I think it probably really tears him apart inside when she doesn't feel the same way about him that he feels about her.

I've also made some connections to Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" that Nabokov is making to other authors. On page 167 he talks about "The Kingdom by the Sea" and his first love's name that got him into this whole psychiatric mess is Annabel which Annabel Lee is the speaker's lover in Edgar Allen Poe's poem. I feel like Humbert is able to relate to Poe because he too was in love with his younger cousin of thirteen and could not help but express his feelings. Humbert also reveals more of himself being an unreliable narrator on page 168 when he says, "I am exaggerating a little." See to the reader, if he is exaggerating here, where else has he been doing it? When he tells everyone that Lolita seduced him? When his wife's death was just an "accident"? For all we know now as readers Lolita was just an innocent little girl that was not being seductive in any way, shape, or form and he plotted his wife's death. But again, that's all just speculation. I'm excited to see where the rest of the story takes us.