Lolita (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Lolita chronicles the life of its narrator and protagonist, Humbert Humbert, focusing on his disastrous love affair with a young girl. In this dark, comic novel, Nabokov paints a complex portrait of obsession that reveals Humbert to be both a middle-aged monster and a wild romantic who fails to attain his ideal.

Part I

In the Foreword, fictitious Freudian psychiatrist John Ray, Ph.D., who claims to be editing Humbert's manuscript titled "Lolita or The Confession of a White Widowed Male," notes that Humbert died in prison in November 1952 of heart disease a few days before the beginning of his trial. He also reveals that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, who the reader will discover at the end of the book is Lolita, died in childbirth on Christmas Day, 1952. Ray, whom Nabokov later admitted he "impersonated," warns readers that they will be "entranced with the book while abhorring its author."

Humbert begins his memoir with "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." He admits that Lolita had a precursor, and that "there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child." During the summer of 1923, Humbert and Annabel, both thirteen, fell "madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other," but were unable to find an opportunity to express it. When Humbert notes that Annabel died four months later of typhus, he wonders, "was it then that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?" He asserts his conviction, though, that "in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel." He defines Lolita as a nymphet, a category of young girls between the age of nine and fourteen who exhibit "fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm," and a certain "demonic" nature.

After Annabel's death, Humbert became obsessed with "nymphets," a condition that eventually prompted him to marry in order to keep his "degrading and dangerous desires" under control. After a few unhappy years, his wife Valeria left him for another man, and he departed for America, where he worked in his late uncle's perfume company. He was hospitalized several times for mental breakdowns before he moved to a small New England town where he could write.

Part II

Humbert rents a room from middle-aged widow Charlotte Haze, who has a twelve-year-old daughter named Dolores, or, as Humbert would come to call her, Lolita. He immediately begins a "pathetic" obsession with Lolita that prompts him after several weeks to marry Charlotte in order to be closer to her daughter. One day after reading his diary, which contains vivid descriptions of his true feelings for her and Lolita, a furious Charlotte confronts him and demands that he leave. Refusing to hear his excuses, she runs out of the house, but before she can mail some letters that will expose him, a car runs her over. "McFate," as Humbert calls it, has just given him the opportunity to have Lolita to himself.

After the funeral, Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and tells her that her mother is about to undergo a serious operation. That night, he takes her to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, where he plans to drug her and then spare "her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude." The sleeping pill he gives her, however, does not have the effect he had hoped for, and so he cannot fulfill his desires. After a restless night, Lolita wakes up, looks at Humbert lying next to her, and promptly seduces him. Later, she tells him she had sexual experiences with a boy at camp. The fact of her previous sexual encounters helps ease his guilty feelings until he notices that "a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness." Later, when she wants to call her mother, he admits she is dead. That night she comes crying to his bed, for "she had nowhere else to go."

Part III

During the next year, as the two travel across America posing as a typical father and daughter on a cross-country trip, Humbert admits that he constantly has to bribe Lolita for sexual favors. He threatens to send her to a reformatory school if she tells anyone about their relationship. At the end of the year, they settle in Beardsley, a northeastern college town where he works on his book and she enrolls in a private girls' school. He keeps "a sharp eye on her" there, restricting her privileges. After an argument, Lolita announces her desire to leave the town and to travel again, and so the two begin another cross-country odyssey. This time Humbert suspects that someone, probably a detective, is following them. During their trip, Lolita comes down with the flu and has to be hospitalized, while Humbert fights his symptoms in a hotel room. When he recovers and calls the hospital to arrange for her discharge, an administrator informs him that her "uncle" had picked her up the day before. Enraged, he begins a desperate search for her and her "abductor" as he heads back east.

Humbert spends the next "three empty years" on the East Coast where he meets and has a brief relationship with a young, rather dim-witted, woman. After receiving a letter from Lolita, who is pregnant, married, and in need of money, he travels to her home where she fills in the missing parts of their story. She explains that she ran off with Clare Quilty, the director of her school play, because he was "the only man she had ever been crazy about." When Quilty pressured her to engage in group sex and in pornographic movies, she left, and eventually married Dick, her "sad-eyed" husband. Even though she now has "ruined looks" and is "hopelessly worn at seventeen," Humbert confesses, "I knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else." When she refuses to come back to him, Humbert gives her some money and leaves, acknowledging that he has broken her life. Eventually, bent on revenge, he tracks down Quilty, and after a prolonged struggle, kills him. His final request is that the manuscript he has written about himself and Lolita be published only after he and Lolita have died, so that "in the minds of later generations" the two can share "immortality."