60 pages • 2 hours read
Vladimir NabokovLolita
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Enchanted Hunters
The Enchanted Hunters is the name of the hotel where Humbert and Lolita first have sex as well as the name of Quilty’s play. At the Enchanted Hunters, Quilty sees Lolita and Humbert together, and he begins his quest to reunite with Lolita; through Lolita’s participation in the performance of Quilty’s play, the reunion takes place. For Quilty, the Enchanted Hunters is the place where a game begins, and he begins here to leave enigmatic clues behind for Humbert. Just the title of his play, The Enchanted Hunters, is a kind of joke he plays on Humbert, because, for Humbert, the Enchanted Hunters marks the start of his greatest romance.
Ironically, the enchanted hunters are Humbert and Quilty, who are hunters enchanted by their obsessive love of young girls. They are also enchanted in another way: both men have warped views of reality. Lolita, for instance, knows that what happened at the hotel is rape, but Humbert views the act as seduction on her part. As well, both men hunt each other at various points in the novel; Quilty follows Humbert for most of Part 2 and Humbert hunts Quilty down and kills him, referring to himself at this point in the novel as “an enchanted and very tight hunter” (294).
Numbers
Numbers pop up in significant ways throughout the text. The number “342” serves as the address for the Haze home, the room at the Enchanted Hunters where Lolita and Humbert first have sex, and the number of hotels Humbert and Lolita have stayed in throughout their years on the road. Other numbers do not repeat as much, but Humbert makes note of them, including the various changing license plate numbers provided by Quilty, which are numbers that have no discernable pattern. When Humbert’s journey is nearing its end, he no longer notes the numbers of the road he is on leaving Coalmont; instead, he does “not remember the number” (281) and gets lost as a result.
Humbert finds meaning in numbers, believing that they offer a pattern by which Humbert can organize his life. The “3” in 342 may be a reference to the love triangle between Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty, while the “42” is a reference to the fact that Humbert dies at the age of 42. The repetition of numbers makes them matter to Humbert and provides his narrative with more significance, as though there is some mystical force behind them. The numbers, a seeming coincidence, also feed into his belief that his story is determined by fate.
Doubling
Humbert writes that he intentionally chose his pseudonym from a list of other doubling names: “Otto Otto,” “Mesmer Mesmer,” and “Lambert Lambert” (308). The fact that Humbert chooses a double name is significant. Throughout the book, Humbert provides a series of double figures and shadows. Humbert and Quilty are two shadows that track each other, and Humber and Gaston, the other scholarly pedophile in Beardsley, also bear a resemblance to each other in behavior and background. Both Quilty and Gaston remind the reader of potential paths Humbert himself could have taken: Quilty is Humbert’s dark side, while Gaston is the man Humbert thought he could be: the pedophile who keeps his secrets to himself.
For Lolita, Humbert offers several blurry doubles, including her mother Charlotte. Lolita starts to blend into Charlotte in Humbert’s eyes, and Lolita also blends with Annabel Leigh; to a lesser extent, Humbert sees Rita as a blend of him and Lolita, because Rita is “twice Lolita’s age and three quarters” (258) his own. Rita is a grown-up version of Lolita, her life ruined by a series of men from her past.
Finally, the novel itself has a doubled structure. The two parts of the novel are nearly identical in length, and the novel opens and closes in a prison setting. Between the beginning and the end, Humbert gets Lolita and then loses her in a mirrored structure.
Movies and Theater
Movies and plays fascinate Lolita. She is reading movie magazines when Quilty notices her at the Enchanted Hunters, and she and Humbert see at least one hundred and fifty movies on their road trip. Humbert notes that Lolita’s favorite genres are “musicals, underworlders, and westerners” (170). Each of these genres offers Lolita an escape and a glimpse of a world she does not know.
Humbert also appreciates movies. He likens his good looks to that of a movie star and even imagines that others will describe his fashion as the type never seen “except in movies, of course” (189). Late in the novel, Humbert provides a would-be director with a movie scene, encouraging the director to melt the faces from a wanted poster into his own. Much of the second half of Part 2 employs scenes and staging that seem right out of one of Lolita’s “underworlders,” with Humbert acting like a detective. He even sees part of a violent shooting at a drive-in the night before he enacts his own violent shooting.
While movies offer Lolita and Humbert an escape from their daily lives, a play drives the plot of Lolita forward. Through her involvement in The Enchanted Hunters, Lolita’s crush on Quilty transforms into love. Humbert thinks Lolita learns to act deceptively during this period; he is familiar with this behavior because he has been acting his entire life to hide his own sexual proclivities. The theater is a rewarding experience for Humbert, and for Quilty, it is the source of his income and the environment in which he finds young girls to prey upon.
For Lolita, her love for films is ironic; the theater and the movies, after all, are environments in which men can take advantage of her. She has largely learned how to comport herself from watching films, and she seems to mimic the seductive techniques a film starlet might use, which draws men to her as they mistake her flirtations for sexual maturity. Quilty uses the theater and promises of Hollywood to take Lolita with him, while Humbert often uses the darkness of the movie theaters to grope Lolita; he also uses Hollywood as the pretext for taking her from Beardsley.
Related Titles
By Vladimir Nabokov
