Humbert Humbert and Cue Anonymous

"... in the destructive element immerse..."(from Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad)

Through the lens of Humbert Humbert's obsession with la nymphette Lolita, ("Lo-lee-ta... light of my life, fire of my loins..."(9)), Nabokov explores and illuminates the cyclical and ever deepening spiral of human desire. Humbert Humbert, thrown back and forth between "... desire and decision, the two things that create a live world..."(71), crosses countless times the slim and shadowy line between purest ecstasy and most wretched despair. In Lolita, Nabokov blurs the defining lines between love and perversion, right and wrong, presenting them, in uncomfortably close juxtaposition, as essentially dependent upon each other.

Humbert Humbert is a tortured man, deeply divided between a sensitive rationality, and his undeniable lust for a forbidden and unripened fruit. United in him are the impulses of a romantic European gentleman, and the obsessions of a lascivious and lecherous old man silently lusting after the tantalizingly ephemeral nymphet -- he is a volatile, fatal juxtaposition of opposite extremes. After years of this silent lust, of "... abusing himself in the dark..."(88), Humbert Humbert finds Lolita....