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

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experience, up to a certain point she is just that.
She is dependent on Humbert materially, she is frightened
because he infuses into her a consciousness of
"shared guilt" and makes her dread the consequences
in case they are found out (148-149); she is subject
to his incessant sexual desire which she resents.
For him their life together is paradise, "a paradise
whose skies were the colour of hell-flames -
but
still
a paradise" (163); for her it is hell. But she can
react only through "vicious vulgarity and childish
despair" (168), expressions of her very helplessness,
through "fits of moodiness" and "storms of sobs" after
"the operation" is over and Humbert is "laughing hap-
pily"
(165); and she has no one to turn to except,
ironically, Humbert: as he says with an awful undertone
of triumph when she comes weeping to his room: "You
see she had absolutely nowhere else to go" (140).
All the elements which have had to be somewhat
artificially separated for the sake of analysis, are
in fact firmly interlinked throughout. The reader is
constantly faced simultaneously with the comic and
the outrageous aspects of Humbert's and Lolita's relationship.
All the time Humbert appears simultaneously
in his role as the comically pathetic lover of a
mindless vulgar little girl, and the hateful pervert
who frightens and pays a child to make her. conform
to his wishes. It is all equally ambivalent with regard
to Lolita: she is incongruous and comic in the
role into which she half manoeuvres herself and in
which she- is half cast against her will, and pathetic