Lolita is a very poetic book, with passages on the beauty of love. But is it love? No, it's a repulsive messed up love story from the mind of a pedophile who seduces a little girl named Delores, taking her on an adventure which ruins her innocence. The feelings which Humbert describe sound legit, and as readers, we have to keep reminding ourselves that Delores is too young to have properly loved Humbert to the extent that he loved her. The age difference between the two is uncanny, she being fourteen and he an adult grown man.
He might think he's in "love", but his view of love is warped by his obsession with his past childhood lover. He is stuck in the past, searching for a replacement. He lusts for little innocent girls who he calls "nymphets". The idea of love is all in his head, a sensational relationship with no morality. Delores becomes his victim, his Lolita. She is robbed from her home, family, friends, and childhood. I believe that Lolita becomes sexually confused within the situation. She doesn't know any better because she's at a young point in her life where she should have a father figure guiding her, someone who knows what is right, but instead Humbert is confusing her by giving her a lover's attention and adventure of a young couple. Humbert isn't much of a parent, and Charlotte's behavior toward Lolita was that of indifference.
But perhaps little Lolita was too scared to not going along with loving Humbert. We don't know because the entire story is warped by the perspective of Humbert himself. He's really flowery with his descriptions and it's all obsessive and in his head. The entire story is suspicious because he can skew anything. Lolita could of ran away as a victim, too scared to leave any time beforehand. The entire love story is most likely obsessively one-sided. How can we trust a story told by an insane narrator? Humbert's narration must be unreliable. We will never get a clear point of view from Lolita. We will never really know why she runs away to Quilty. We can go along with Humbert's story and assume that it's because Lolita loved someone else, or that Quincy took Lolita from Humbert. However, it's more likely that she ran away because she wasn't in love with anyone - she was simply scared and wanted to get away.
The entire story is a confession. The author, Nabokov, writes suspiciously as a PhD using the excuse of writing the work as an "interesting case study", fascinating scientifically. As readers, we know it's a form of pornography, and he's obviously keeping an arms length away from the situation by dancing around the subject completely. He points that the reader must be a pedophile if they enjoy any bit of the story, an uncomfortable mind game because the entire story is told like a classic love story minus the age factor. We question our morals and Humbert's story as a confession of his crimes with Lolita. It's a misreading if a reader thinks that Humbert thinks of himself as a monster, even if he bluntly stated that he's a monster. He does that to cover himself in self-defense to the jury. Humbert never says that what he did was okay. He has no regrets when recounting his past with Lolita. He thinks that the morals of the world don't apply to him, that his actions are justified, better than the society norm. This questions readers even more as a moral/psychological/philosophical experiment. Morality is different to different audiences.
I questioned the way I thought about morality. Sometimes I felt sorry for Humbert because he would show himself as a victim. But it is all distorted. His motives are selfish and lack morality. Any grown man who claims innocence to touching a young girl inappropriately isn't moral. They're simply pedophiles with excuses to justify their inappropriate actions. The victim doesn't seduce them. Humbert didn't bring Lolita on a trip through the states for the pure hell of it. It was an escape from the rest society to satisfy his sexual appetite. Humbert is no doubt a sexual predator. Humbert says that Lolita initiated sexual interaction, that it was consensual and she had even "done it before". Even if she was experimental, it is normal for her age to do so. The consensus that she is too young to be with Humbert, that society does not accept lovers of great age difference. It is socially more disgusting to the reader when reaching the turning point to where we know that she's just a thirteen year old child when she first sleeps with him. The idealist view of love is a consensual love. But this story questions if love is consensual at all. The reality of love is a possessive game of seduction with a seducer and a seduced. The seducer is obsessive and carried away, and the seduced is usually the stupid or damsel. Lolita is written like a classic love novel, where there are romantic expectations from society. Lolita is set in the 1950s, a time especially against the age difference of Humbert and Lolita as lovers. There is a lot of conflict in this beautified version of morally wrong love. It is too well crafted, too unsettling, pushing the boundaries of morality, and questioning what readers think is moral.
