Lolita

Humbert breaks from the narrative to complain about prison. He has written a hundred pages and is unsure if he can go on. Humbert places the date of the point in the narrative at roughly August 15, 1947 and then writes “Lolita” over and over again, asking whoever publishes the text to fill an entire page with her name (which the publisher does not do).

Humbert retrieves Lolita from Camp Q and notes she does not look as pretty as he had recalled. He decides he will be a father figure to her but then suddenly recognizes her as his Lolita again and casts aside those virtuous impulses. He tells Lolita her mother is in the hospital, and they speed off in Charlotte’s sedan. Lolita asks if she can call Humbert “Dad” and then says she’s been “revoltingly unfaithful” to him because he has “stopped caring” for her. Then she flirts with him and asks him to kiss her. While they kiss, a police officer stops and asks them if they have seen a speeding blue sedan pass by. They have not. They proceed to Briceland and the Enchanted Hunters hotel.

In room number 342—the same room number as their house address, no twin beds are present. The twin room has been taken, and Humbert is unable to procure a cot for Lolita. They will have to share a double bed, and Lolita giggles and says that sharing a bed is incest. Lolita tells Humbert he kisses wrong and shows him how to do it but then grows bored. They go to the dining room downstairs, and Lolita notes that someone there looks like Clare Quilty, the celebrity playwright whose picture she marked “H.H.” Humbert shows her a sleeping pill, which she is eager to take due to its color. While she grows drowsy in the hotel room, she tells him she’s been “such a disgusting girl” (123). Humbert says that can wait and locks her in the room. 

Humbert says once again that he had not planned on taking Lolita’s “purity” when he picked her up—he merely wanted to fondle her sleeping body. He notes that her purity may have been damaged by a sexual encounter with another young girl at camp. Additionally, he recognizes that Annabel and Lolita are not the same and admits he should have known that “pain and horror would result from the expected rapture” (125) of his actions, adding that he would do things differently if he could. Humbert is excited that she is finally his and that he will soon be able to touch her.

Downstairs, Humbert wanders through the various public spaces of the hotel. Outside, on the terrace, he encounters a man sitting in a chair in the darkness who seems to accuse Humbert of doing inappropriate things with Lolita, whom he claims is his daughter. But when Humbert asks him to repeat himself, the man corrects what he says to say something innocuous that sounds vaguely similar: “you lie, she’s not” becomes “July was hot” (127). The man asks Humbert and Lolita to join him for lunch the next day, but Humbert declines, as Humbert plans on leaving with Lolita in the morning. On the way back to his room, he accidentally steps in the middle of a photo being taken in the lobby. 

Back in Room 342, Lolita is drowsy, but the sleeping pill is not strong enough to lull her into sleep. She keeps saying the name “Barbara.” Humbert crawls into bed next to her but makes no sexual advances, even as he stays awake all night, unable to sleep due to the noises of the hotel and his own arousal. Lolita nudges next to him in the morning while he pretends to sleep. She asks if he had sex when he was her age, and he truthfully says no. Humbert states that she seduces him, and they have sex. He says that she sees sex as just something children do in a matter-of-fact way, since children do not understand what adults do. Humbert says to the reader he’d rather not describe the act of sex with her, as he would prefer to explain the “perilous magic of nymphets” (134). 

Humbert states he must “tread carefully” lest the reader fall for Lolita. He then describes the changes he would make to the Enchanted Hunters hotel so as to make the hotel more naturally romantic for his first sexual encounter with Lolita.

Humbert explains various parts of his sexual experience with Lolita. He justifies his actions by citing legal doctrines from the church that allow a girl of twelve years of age to marry. And he notes that an old magazine from the prison library explains how the “stimulating temperate climates” (135) of America help girls to mature by the age of twelve. He also reminds the reader, his jury, Lolita had another lover before him.

After they have had sex, Lolita tells Humbert of her earlier sexual experiences. He asks her which of her classmates, whose names he memorized, she has experimented with, and she says most of them have experimented amongst themselves but not always with her. At camp, she would guard the bushes on Lake Climax’s Willow Island, where her friend Barbara would have sex with Charlie Holmes, the son of the woman who ran the camp. Eventually, she grew curious and also had sex with Charlie. The girls would take turns with Charlie, and Lolita says it was fun but, to Humbert’s delight, she held “Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt” (137). Humbert gives Lolita the gifts he purchased and tells her to wait in the lobby and not speak to strangers. He asks the hotel desk clerk if his wife has called. While leaving, he notices a man who resembles his Swiss uncle, Gustave Trapp, staring at Lolita while she reads a movie magazine. The man seems to be the same age as Humbert.

Humbert is concerned about how to keep what they’ve done secret but also wishes to do it again. Lolita seems uninterested in him and even accuses him of rape, but Humbert is not sure if she is serious. At a gas station, she complains of pain and accuses Humbert of having torn something inside of her. She wants the number of her mother’s hospital, but he says Lolita cannot call her, finally admitting to her that Charlotte is dead.

In a town called Lepingville, Humbert buys Lolita toys, candy, clothing, and comics, as well as a box of sanitary pads. They get two separate rooms at the hotel, but he hears Lolita crying. She comes to his room at some point in the night because she “ha[s] absolutely nowhere else to go” (142).