Lolita Close Reading #2

“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.” p.12 This excerpt specifically made me notice a lot of things about Humbert and caused me to ponder how specific events can change a person. His descriptions about the time give me the sense that before Annabel's death he was a very "normal" kid and while there was other struggles going on in his life until that time he had not let it effect him. It seems almost as if her death snapped the last straw. From this point on it seemed as if he lost his compassion for others and became selfish. It can be seen at how he states that he had flings with multiple woman, but never settled and would get with woman like for example Lolita's mom for personal gain I didn't notice this until the end of the novel when he sees Lolita and finally notices completely what he did wrong. While before he did care about her it was not until that point that he truly cared more about her than his personal gain. This can be seen clearly by how he leaves her since he sees that she is happy even though it is not what he wants. So one could say that that event of Anabel's death ended up causing Humbert to become the selfish man that he became.