Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Famous Novel That Most People Have Not Heard is About Multiple Personality

Lolita (1955) is usually spoken of as a novel about a 38-year-old literature professor, Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Delores Haze (Lolita). And that’s true, as far as it goes.

However, if you read an extensive review of the novel, like the one in Wikipedia, you will find, if you don’t blink (it is mentioned only in passing):

“Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's William Wilson, a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym. The theme of the doppelgänger also occurs in Nabokov's earlier novel, Despair.”

That is, the character Clare Quilty is Humbert Humbert’s double, his alternate personality.

For a detailed literary analysis, see:

Meyer, Priscilla, “Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?” (2009). Division III Faculty Publications. Paper 305. Wesleyan University:
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div3facpubs/305

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