Critical Lens Close Reading

Text: Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

Critical Lens: Psychoanalytical

Now, squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self. When my mother died in a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist (so I vividly imagined her), had run panting ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt, I was but an infant, and in retrospective no yearnings of the accepted kind could I ever graft upon any moment of my youth, no matter how savagely psychotherapists heckled me in my later periods of depression. But I admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead personal ignorance of universal emotions. I may have also relied too much on the abnormally chill relations between Charlotte and her daughter...It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during ot singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of families lives was better than the parody of incest, which in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.

In this passage the reader is able to see that Humbert Humbert is now realizing that Lolita does not have the same feelings as he does towards her. In this chapter Lolita tears up when she sees an ordinary encounter between her friend and her father. We are able to see that she may hide emotions of wanting to know what it is like to have a real father. Humber also realizes that Lolita is missing her mother. This shows that Humbert can only assume what Lolita is thinking but he never talked to her about her true feelings in her relationship with her step father. She did not even receive a lot of emotional support from anyone when her mother died, which could have affected her current mental state. The author used the characters in this novel in order to show that the the theories of Sigmund Freud can be proven wrong through many situations. He wrote this novel not only to show that the theories were wrong but to also prove a point in the views of love.