The aspects of double in Lolita

The aspects of double in Lolita
”The good reader is my brother, my double” --Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
“Reader! Bruder!”

The novel Lolita has many uses of doubling, created by an real author Vladimir Nabukov and an fictional author Humbert Humbert.This ambiguity from the literary doubling creates the instability of the plot and naration itself.
The double1 of the author Vladimir Nabukov and the fictional author Humbert Humbert
Like Nabukov, Humbert calls his reader „…my brother, my double” as he tries to justify his crime and attempts to win his reader sympathy for his criminal tratament of Dolores Haze, while Nabukov hopes that his reader will be ideal critical interepret .
In this process of writing his double tale, Humbert obtains self awareness and tries to expiate for his sins. He writes his “confession” as the history of his discovery of his “evil double” in Quilty. Humbert, the literary scholar and artist, is sophisticated enough to understand the implications of the genre for himself: the original of a set of doubles, called the “host,” shares at some level the despised qualities of his double. The reader may decide to what degree Humbert knows consciously that Quilty represents his own reprehensible nature, but as author of his own Doppelgånger tale, he must know and deplore his resemblance to him at some level.
Humbert and Humbert Humbert also creates himself as double within his narrative, addressing himself in the third person, even the name "Humbert Humbert" reflects an inner duality.Lolita contains at least three interpretating levels of doubling by two artists, HH/HH (narrator/narratee)--HH/Quilty (author/character)--Nabokov/HH (author/novel). The complexity of this three-fold doubling negates any opposition, of ideal/real, or good/evil, to name the dualities most typical of the conventional double tale.
Humbert Humbert and his Doppelgångeri Quilty
Quilty is Humbert’s double in the novel and represents Humbert’s darker side. Humbert is evil in many ways, but Quilty is more evil, and his presence suggests that the line between good and evil is blurred rather than distinct. Humbert and Quilty seem near opposites for much of the novel. Humbert adores and worships Lolita, while Quilty uses and ultimately abandons her. Humbert presents his own feelings for Lolita as tender and Quilty’s as depraved. However, the men are more similar than different. Both are educated and literary. Both, of course, are pedophiles. Humbert sees himself as the force of good, avenging Lolita’s corruption, yet he himself originally robbed Lolita of her innocence.
By the end of the novel, Humbert and Quilty become even more closely identified with one another. When Humbert and Lolita play tennis one day, Humbert leaves to take a phone call, and Quilty sneaks in on the game to briefly become Lolita’s partner. Lolita eventually leaves Humbert for Quilty, but her new life is hardly an improvement. When Humbert finally confronts Quilty, the men become one and the same as they struggle with each other. Humbert, describing their fight, says, “We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.” His jumbled use of the first-person and third-person plurals indicates that he and Quilty are no longer distinct from one another. The already blurred line between the two men has now disappeared entirely.
Also, Humbert calls him Clare Obscure, an English translation of the Italian chiaroscuro, light and dark, a technique in art that creates a sense of form, of reality, out of light and shade. The scene of Quilty’s murder is fantastical, and parodic of multiple genres from American Westerns, quite out of keeping with the apparently realist novel we thought we just read. Quilty emerges from the shadows gradually throughout the first reading of the novel.

Do you think that Quilty is the Doppelgånger of Humbert?Why?
In my opinion Quilty is the Doppelgånger of Humbert because:
-Both a “vicarious agent and a frustrating usurper of the subject’s pleasures,” the double performs its host’s identity, which is invariably bound up with sexuality, involving a continuing power play between the two selves. Humbert the nympholept competes for possession of Lolita with Quilty the pornographer.
-The double tale “represents the abiding interdependence of real and fantasy worlds, impossibly co-present at the site of the Doppelganger encounter,” and “suspends conventions of genre, creating scenes which may be parodic play or deadly earnest.” Humbert’s final confrontation with his double in the Pavor Manor scene (on Grimm road) combines the fairy tale, the American Western film, and the Gothic novel (e. g. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”), and the shooting of Quilty is comic-fantastic

Bibliography

1. Nabukov, Vladimir, ”Lolita”, Ed. Polirom, București, 2011;
2. Meyer, Priscilla, "Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?" (2009).Division III Faculty Publications.Paper 305.
3. Slethaug, Gordon E., ” The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction ”, http://books.google.ro/books?id=g-c1eOFxYIgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro#v=onepage&q&f=false

Bibliography: 1. Nabukov, Vladimir, ”Lolita”, Ed. Polirom, București, 2011; 2. Meyer, Priscilla, "Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?" (2009).Division III Faculty Publications.Paper 305. 3. Slethaug, Gordon E., ” The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction ”, http://books.google.ro/books?id=g-c1eOFxYIgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro#v=onepage&q&f=false