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

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The murder has been seen as a symbolic act: "One
self has destroyed the other and Humbert is made
whole"73, but Stegner sees it, too, as a parody of a
formula, and so does Appel, who argues that, strictly
speaking, "it should not be necessary to kill Quilty
and what he represents, for... in asking the no longer
nymphic Lolita to go away with him, [Humbert] has
transcended his obsession. "74
Ironically, Humbert himself seems to undercut the
symbolical meaning of Quilty's death. Driving away
after the murder, he crosses over to the left side of
the highway, which Field interprets as a sign that
"he has no more to fear from his sinister double"75,
but, as Humbert says, "it occurred to me - not
by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like
that... " (298).
If it is all the same possible to see Quilty at
least up to a certain point as a reflection of Humbert's
evil self and to see in his destruction "a
moral purgation for Humbert"76, it is because of those
qualities (which Quilty has not got) that reprieve
Humbert from unrelieved damnation and which make him
"transcend his obsession".
"... in recent fiction no lover has thought of his
beloved with so much tenderness... no woman has been
so charmingly evoked, in such grace and delicacy, as
Lolita. "77 There are passages in which Humbert per-
ceives and speaks of Lolita's youthfulness and beauty
in terms of which no one else in the novel, and cer-
tainly not Quilty, would be capable: