''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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solved, that is, that something should not turn out
to be just horrible or just comic after all, and that
the reaction should not be reduced to either one or the
other.
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Both forms of the grotesque are to be found everywhere
in Lolita and they account for the unique impact it
makes. They give its peculiar quality to the action,
both to the main action and to minor incidents and
encounters; and they determine the quality of the relation
of Humbert Humbert and Lolita and are the reason
for the uneasiness and uncertainty the reader experiences
with regard to his reaction to the book. He can neither
simply react with indignation as he might feel he ought
to, for much in the relation is incongruous and comic.
Nor can he react simply to the comic side of it, because
the amusement is constantly qualified by the awareness
of the impossible outrage of it all. The response is
further complicated by the fact that Humbert tells his
story in the comic, parodistic style hinted at above,
which, in view of what he is telling, is felt to be
another
outrage.
However, before that story actually starts, Humbert
gives a lengthy account, couched in equally inapproriate
language, of some events and experiences that preceded
it and, as he pretends, led up to it. He acquaints the
reader with his peculiar affliction, making at the same
time a comic mock-effort to explain it and excuse it. The
origin of his nympholepsy, he tries to make the reader believe,
was an experience in his early youth, his unful-
filled love for Annabel Leigh, a girl then roughly his own
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