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

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ations ) (98). And he describes his own mock enaction
of all the appropriate emotions that are expected of
him at this "tragic" moment, but which he wisely does
not overdo : {'The widower, a man of exceptional selfcontrol,
neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit,
that he did;... " (98). And he staggers "friend" Beale
(the "friend" being another comic touch, for Beale is
the driver of the fatal car), "the agent of fate" by
accepting "with a drunken sob of gratitude" the offer
to pay the funeral home expenses (102).
With the gruesome elements thus intimately linked
with the comic, with a fatal accident related in
Humbert's comically irreverent and ironic style, his
account of his stay at Ramsdale ends on a grotesque
note, which suitably rounds it off (for that stay has
its own grotesque aspects), and which sets the suitable
tone for the account of his grotesque relation
and journeys with Lolita.
It was said above that much in the relation of
Humbert Humbert and Lolita is comic. Given the basic
fact that Humbert is middle-aged and Lolita a girl
of twelve, this sounds in itself a rather incongruous
statement: the natural and spontaneous reaction to
Humbert's confession is one of horrified revulsion,
for, as Lionel Trilling says (even though he comes to
the conclusion that Lolita is really about love):
the novel makes "a prolonged assault on one of our
unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions,
the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age. j, 27
It is this intimate connection of the comic and the