Lolita

Around Christmas, Lolita gets sick. Once she is well, Humbert throws “a Party with Boys” (198). The party goes poorly, as Lolita does not like any of the boys. As a reward, Humbert buys Lolita a new tennis racket. For her birthday, he buys her a book of modern paintings as well as a bike. Lolita does not appreciate art, which disappoints him, especially because her inability to understand art means she cannot appreciate his opinions about art. Lolita does, however, like the bike, and he enjoys watching her ride it. 

In early spring, Lolita starts rehearsing for the play, which is actually called The Enchanted Hunters. Her role is that of a farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a witch who can entrance hunters. Humbert assumes the story is based on a New England legend and that the title is a coincidence. He understands the play to be one written specifically for schools, though he now knows it was a recent play written by a famous playwright.

Humbert is worried that Lolita will make fun of Humbert for dreaming of the past, so he does not point out to her that the play’s title is that of the hotel where they first had sex. One day in May, she asks him if the name of the hotel where he “raped” her was the Enchanted Hunters and then laughs and rides away on her bike. 

Humbert allows Lolita to take piano lessons with a Miss Emperor. One day, she calls him and says Lolita has been skipping lessons. Angry, Humbert confronts her, and Lolita says she has been going to the park to rehearse the play. Mona confirms Lolita’s excuse, but he assumes both of them are lying. He notices Lolita has changed and is becoming less of a nymphet. Still, he wants to keep her to himself and threatens to remove her from Beardsley. Lolita and Humbert have an argument during which she says he raped her and that she knows he killed Charlotte. He demands she reveal her hiding spaces while grabbing onto her wrist; she tries to escape his grip when a neighbor’s phone call interrupts them. While he apologizes to the neighbor for the noise, Lolita leaves on her bike.

Humbert searches for Lolita on foot, eventually finding her in a glass phone booth where she hangs up the receiver once she sees him; she claims she was trying to call him. She also says that she has made a decision and asks Humbert, whom she calls “Dad,” to buy her a soda at the fountain. He admires her beauty and feels bad about hurting “that childish wrist” (207). As they go home in the pouring rain, he is on foot and she is on her bike; she tells him she wants to leave the town with him but only if she gets to decide where they go. Humbert agrees. At home, she asks him to carry her upstairs as she is feeling “sort of romantic” (207). Her request brings him to tears. 

Humbert withdraws Lolita from school, explaining that she will return when his Hollywood job wraps up. Lolita has chosen the route and their hotels, and both Humbert and Lolita are excited to travel. Leaving town, the acting coach pulls up alongside them to lament the fact that Lolita could not stay in the play; Humbert “should have heard the author raving about her after that rehearsal—” (208). Lolita cuts her off to remind Humbert the light is green. Driving away, Humbert asks about the playwright, and Lolita tells him it was “some old woman, Clare Something, I guess” (209). Humbert tells Lolita they will have a joyful journey. 

Humbert notes that he used to see the Appalachians on a map and imagine them as longer Alps, but now he knows they are filled with suburban and rural wastelands. As Humbert and Lolita journey westward, they stay in a variety of hotels that present themselves as welcoming while warning guests not to steal things. Humbert notes that hotels have changed since his last road trip.

Throughout the voyage, Humbert watches Lolita closely and tries to prevent her from talking to others, but she still manages to escape occasionally. She often changes her mind about routes and hotels seemingly without reason. He notes that he recognizes in hindsight that she had given him clues that he should have noticed at the time. Once, Humbert leaves her in the room but suddenly gets anxious and finds her fully dressed when he returns, as though she has just been out. She says she just woke up, and he assumes she is lying, but he cannot prove it and does not notice any unusual cars in the parking lot. 

Humbert has been traveling with a Colt pistol that belonged to Lolita’s father. It is the gun John Farlow taught him to fire, and he now keeps it hidden in an ornate box given to him by Gaston Godin. The gun, he reminds the reader, symbolizes the father’s phallus in Freudian analysis.

Humbert asks the reader to forget about the gun, for now. As he and Lolita continue traveling west, he continues to grow suspicious. He sees Lolita talking to a man who looks like his uncle Gustave Trapp, and Lolita tells Humbert she was merely helping the man with directions. She notes that she used to be confused by odometers when she was younger, and Humbert wonders if this seeming spontaneous mention of her pre-Humbert childhood is a trick she learned in the theater. The next day, he thinks they are being followed by an Aztec Red Convertible, and he is able to shake it off his tail. Lolita claims to have misread a tour book when Humbert finds out the attraction she had picked in Wace is closed; instead, they go to the theater to watch a play written by two playwrights named Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom. Humbert looks for the authors, but they seem to be lost in the shadows of the theater, and he can only glimpse the shoulders of a woman and the flashes of a tuxedo. He grabs Lolita’s wrist again, and she calls him a brute. Pushed by Humbert, she says that Vivian is a man and that Clare is the female playwright of The Enchanted Hunters. Humbert teases her about her crush on a celebrity named Clare Quilty, but Lolita assures him he is mistaken. Humbert notes that the young forget everything while he will always remember every part of her time as a nymphet.

At the Wace post office, Humbert collects letters for Lolita and himself and sees the most wanted posters, imagining a film version of his story showing his face melting into those of the wanted men. He reads a letter from Mona addressed to Lolita in which she describes the performance of The Enchanted Hunters and makes a note about “Qu’il t’y—What a tongue twister!” (223). After reading the letter, he sees that Lolita has disappeared. He chases her down, and she tells him that she ran into a friend from Beardsley, one Humbert could not possibly know; he makes it clear he knows the name of everyone her age in town. Even as he asks her where exactly she went and with whom, Lolita offers nothing. He tells her that he has written down the license plate of the car following them and then finds out she has erased the number. He cannot remember it, and he slaps her.

Later, Humbert notices the man who has been following them has switched cars multiple times. After getting a flat tire, Humbert notices the man, and he is the same man whom Humbert calls Trapp after an uncle Humbert thinks the man resembles. Trapp is sitting in a car stopped behind Humbert’s. As Humbert walks toward Trapp’s car, Trapp turns around and Humbert’s car begins to move. He finds Lolita behind the wheel. She says she was trying to prevent the car from rolling away. He realizes she had learned how to drive from watching him and gets down to fix the tire and perform “the ‘ordeal of the orb,’ as Charlotte used to say” (229). Humbert moves the gun from the box to his pocket.