Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (post 3): This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite

Now that I’ve read Lolita, I’m no longer interested in whether Clare Quilty is a “double” of Humbert Humbert (HH). No, the main feature of this novel—especially in regard to multiple personality—is self-contradiction.

At the beginning of Lolita, HH spells out his fixation on “nymphets,” who are pubescent girls aged nine to fourteen. But at the end, HH wants to live forever-after with Lolita even though she is no longer a nymphet: She is years too old, not to mention married and pregnant by someone else.

The way that Nabokov glosses over this contradiction is that he calls HH “a maniac,” which is not a valid diagnosis, and is just a poor excuse to account for anything, no matter how inconsistent. (The reason that there is such a thing as psychiatric diagnosis is that symptoms tend to be consistent.)

Either the author had more than one narrative personality, whose differences were not reconciled in rewrite, or the author failed to “prune” (as Stephen King would say) what the characters told him and failed to “control” his characters (as Toni Morrison would say) (as quoted in past posts).

It is like the person who wrote the end of this novel was not the same person who wrote the beginning, and hadn’t even read the beginning.