The annotated Lolita # 7

1. Losing Lo. Part Two: Chapters 18-20.
2. Finding Lo. Part Two: Chapters 27-29.
3. Killing Quilty. Part Two: Chapters 33-end.

Losing Lo:  one thing that's struck me in this chapter was when Humbert had failed to memorize the car number of cue. The number he had written down was carefully rewritten by Lolita so as to lead him astray. This part of the story reminds me of earlier in the book when Humbert and Lolita are reading about kidnappings--police instruction emphasizes the importance of keeping record of the few things that could be tracked at that time, one of these things being license plates. That was a foreshadowing of this scene, and since nothing is coincidental with Humbert as the narrator (and Nabokov as the author) it seems this is a mechanism to get the reader to see humbert as a parent protecting his child from a kidnapping. This of course leads the reader to the remembering of the fact that he has kidnapped Lolita. This relates back to the theme of Humbert's constant depiction of other men as the rapists and violators of Lolita, when in fact nobody has violated or stolen her from her life more than he has.

Finding Lo: I find it interesting that in this particularly moving section of the book, Humbert's seems to begin to make his most honest confessions and realizations pertaining to what he's done to Lolita's childhood; in ways that both she and him are aware of. For example he imagines what she is thinking when she speaks of her rejecting Humbert and saying she would quicker return to cue. "He broke my heart. You merely broke my life." So it is peculiar how Lolita seems to sweep this in which they both know under the rug, reuniting with the man that "took her innocence" and not having something to say to him about it in confrontation. However it could be read that her cold disposition was her revenge as she knew it hurt Humbert. I say she sweeps it under the rug not just because of her not seeming angry but she also said "oh, don't cry, I'm sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are." Could it be she thinks they were lovers and she cheated, or is she just trying to hurt himin saying this? Since Humbert's lense as a narrator is unreliable it is difficult to tell.

Killing quilty: what struck me in this section was the comedic aspect to the murder. It is very theatrical, not surprisingly due to the work quilty does. it is typical of Humbert as the narrator to make this relevant to how he depicts the characters that he interacts with. Again, nothing seems to be coincidental in the world of nabokov. It's interesting to me how much more revealing Humbert is in his true foolishness in this part of the book. Or more so ,how his fraudulent poetic disposition is  made obvious to other characters in the Book,  quilty seems to mock him. I wonder why he chose to do this at the part of the book that was meant to depict him as a passionate hero if he was completely focused on ego. Is this another one of Humbert's self pitying thought processes, or perhaps masochistic ones?