Psychological Labyrinth In Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov

Psychological Labyrinth What does it really mean to be insane? Most people put labels on others because they can’t really understand the way that “crazy” person’s mind works. Everyone is different in terms of how they think but society as a whole usually thinks similarly. However, there are those few individuals whose minds operate outside of the moral, ethical and logical thinking of society. In the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a man named John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. received the manuscript, entitled Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male, from the author’s lawyer. The author himself, known by the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert, died in jail of coronary thrombosis. Humbert is a convicted pedophile and murderer who gives an insight in his mind in an attempt to explain his actions. Humbert is actually quite smart and aware of is morally and ethically wrong actions, but he leads the reader on to believe that what he did was justifiable. Through
“In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch… keeping the enemy busy” (Nabokov 14). To him this event is magical and because of the deep personal significance the event holds for him, Humbert will forever associate this experience with Annabel to nymphets, girls between the age of nine and fourteen, thinking they could bring back such euphoric feelings due to their similar physical features. He obsessively longs for the same feeling he once had with Annabel, thus unconsciously becoming obsessed with a twelve-year old girl named Delores, or Lolita as he calls her. “It was the same child- the same frail, honey-hued shoulders… The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitation point, and vanished” (Nabokov 39). Seeing Lolita for the first time reminds him of Annabel and thoughts of experiencing the same euphoria he once did cause him to develop an unhealthy obsession with