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

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and implies in the parody that nothing could be more
absurd than to try and understand his problem by believing
in his "childhood trauma".
"As a case history, 'Lolita' will become, no doubt,
a classic in psychiatric circles", John Ray mockingly
predicts in his Foreword (7). Humbert suspects the
same, and parodying and ridiculing the psychoanalytical
approach, he frankly mocks not only Freud and his methods
but also the future reader and critic of his memoir,
one of whose possible reactions he anticipates in the
comic "analysis" of his "case".
This is not the only instance in which the reader
is made the object of parody. Both Ray and Humbert
Humbert also anticipate the storm of moral indignation
that Lolita was to raise, and parodying it, exclude it,
too, as a valid approach. Ray calls Humbert "abject"
and "horrible"; "a shining example of moral leprosy"
and "abnormal" (6), into which chain of epithets
Dupee's "a thorough creep" and "a sex fiend"19fit
nicely. Humbert Humbert himself joins in with Ray's
comic denouncement of his vice, and so convincing does
he manage to sound that he has been said to be con-
ducting not only his own defence but also his own pro-
secution.
20
There is certainly some truth in this as
far as the later parts of his memoir are concerned,
but at the beginning, when he talks of a time at which
Lolita has not yet entered his life, he seems to be
doing no more than giving the reader what he expects.
His self-accusations sound too stale and conventional
to be taken for expressions of sincere and genuine