Lolita Part 1

Whoa. That's the best way I can describe reading the first 62 pages of Nabokov's book, Lolita. The book has to this point left me with an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. I do think it's interesting to see inside the mind of a man who's struggling with pedophilia, but reading Humbert think sensually about young girls still leaves me an extreme sense of being uncomfortable.

First off, I'll just run through a few of the words that I looked up while reading. Seraph means a member of the highest order of angels. This helped me begin to understand Humbert at the beginning of the novel. The next word I found was nymphet, which means a sexually attractive young girl. Finally, the last word I looked up was prophylactic, which means preventive or protective.

Before reading the book, I knew the premise included a man being enamored by a young girl, Lolita. Since I knew this, the first line of the story pretty much set the stage for what I was to expect in the rest of the novel. Nabokov chooses to start the story with this sentence: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul" (page 3). From the beginning of the story, I now knew this would be a no holds barred look at the mind of a pedophile.

Humbert then goes into how he started off delving into his attraction of younger girls, including his initial love with a girl named Annabel who he tried to make love with but ultimately failed. He then goes on to talk about various prostitutes he came to know, and how he only found the nymphets, or the girls under 14 years old, to be attractive. I did find it interesting that Humbert speaks to the audience in a persuasive manner, trying to get them to side with him. Anywhere he can, he tries to gain sympathy from the readers. For example, he wants himself to be viewed as the opposite of a stereotypical pedophile by describing himself as "an exceptionally handsome man; slow moving, tall, with soft dark hair" (page 25). He then goes on to mention he could get any adult woman he wanted, showing that his going after girls was not some desperate attempt for love, but it's just the way he is.

Finally, Humbert begins to speak about his feelings for Lolita, who lives in the same boarding house as Humbert does. He does know that what he's doing is viewed by many others as wrong, because he does his best to hide his lustful desires from anyone else. He patiently waits for the best moment to pursue Lolita, when nobody else is around. This is where things get more strange.

Humbert is teasing Lolita with an apple, and begins to playfully wrestle with her in his lap. Nabokov's distinct imagery here is both beautiful from Humbert's perspective and at the same time respulsive I'm sure to most readers. The lustful feelings of Humbert come to full tilt, with imagery being used such as, "I crushed out against her left butock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known" (page 61). These paragraphs of sensual pleasure that Humbert describes really tap into the innermost feelings of his soul. He is crying out to the "jury" that his love is real and that he is not some crazed man sexually abusing kids just for kicks. After reading, though, you are still left with an unexplained feeling of shame for what you just read.