''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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eternal beauty, and his conviction that he has found
it in Lolita, that is at the root of his view of her
and causes unhappiness to both.
Lolita1, as written by Humbert Humbert in his
prison cell is made available to the reader through the
intermediary of one John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., who claims
to have been asked by Clarence Choate Clarke, Esq.,
his own friend and Humbert's lawyer, to publish it.
It is preceded by a Kinbotean sort of Foreword by
John Ray, which sets the tone for the entire novel,
for, as the novel itself, it contains passages that have
to be taken at their face value and others which do
not, and it is not easy to distinguish between them
and to disentangle them. There are those passages which
are quite obviously parodies of a foreword proper and
of various critical conventions, and they seem misleading
and beside the point in the same way as Kinbote's
critical apparatus in Pale Fire. However, by
negation of the things they parody, they contain valid
comments on Humbert's memoir and a valuable help towards
an understanding of it. And there are those passages
which have the same parodistic look about them, but
which are not, in fact, parodies, but genuine and true
comments on the story about to unfold.
Ray presents Humbert's memoir as based on actual
events. He explains how he happens tobe its editor.
k
He takes pains to establish that he has treated it with
due respect, that what the reader has before him is
indeed the memoir as Humbert wrote it, ". intact", save
(and here he sounds very Kinbotean) "for the correction