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

- 141 -
ous hallucination" (287).
69
It is certainly a parodistic innovation that, after
the "evil self" (Quilty) has first pursued the "good
self" (Humbert), the roles should be reversed and
Humbert should in his turn pursue his evil and perverse
alter ego. Also, it is not in the tradition of
the Doppelgänger tale that this pursuit should demand
so much detective ingenuity of the pursuer as to turn
the account of it into something like Poe's Tales of
Ratiocination, and to grant him success only because
he is a literary expert and able to decipher all the
clues his victim has planted - which is again something
that doubles do not normally do.
The confusion becomes almost complete in their
fight, in which "We rolled all over the floor, in each
other's arms.. . and I felt suffocated as he rolled over
me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled
over him. We rolled over us" (291), and as Humbert
drives
away, he is still "all covered with Quilty,
With the feel of that tumble before the bleeding"
(298). 70
Quilty, who "rightly balks at his symbolic
role"71 and dies only after impossibly long and comi-
72
cally Shakespearean death throes, also considers
the question of identity as far from settled: Accused
by Humbert of kidnapping Lolita, he denies all res-
ponsibility and lays all the blame on Hum1ert: "I
did not!... I saved her from a beastly pervert. Show
me your badge instead of shooting at my foot, you ape,
you... I am not responsible for the rapes of others"
(290).