In his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov recalls feeling the "first little pulse of Lolita" pass through him while reading a newspaper article about a monkey who, " after months of persuasion by a scientist, he produced the first ever charcoal drawing of an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." The image of a confinement so complete that it dominates and shapes artistic expression (however limited that expression may be) is moving and powerful, and is, in fact, reflected in the text of Lolita. Humbert Humbert, the eloquent poet-narrator of the novel, observes the world through the bars of his obsession, his "nympholepsy", and this confinement profoundly affects the quality of his narrative. In particular, his powerful sexual desires prevent him from understanding Lolita in any meaningful way, so that throughout the text what he describes is not the real Lolita, but an abstract creature, with no depth or substance beyond the complex set of symbols and allusions that he describes. associate with her. When in his rare moments of weariness Humbert seems to lift this literary veil, he reveals for a moment the violent contrast between his intricate and manipulated narrative and the stark ugliness of a very different truth. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In one of the novel's most elaborate and vivid scenes, Humbert arouses himself to a sexual climax while Lolita sits, unconscious, on his lap. Rejoicing at the unexpected and unnoticed fulfillment, he states that "Lolita has been quietly solipsized" (60). Solipsism, the epistemological theory that the self is the only knowable thing and that reality consists exclusively of its active perceptions and modifications, most closely reflects Humbert's relationship with Lolita. Through his language he creates a distance between Dolores and Lolita, between the child and the "solipsized" creature upon whom he can "safely" impose his sexual desire. Humbert's version is a mixture of several closely connected, often contrasting, personal images. Some are the product of his imagination, while others derive from classic works of literature or popular songs. He makes no effort to separate these images, but quickly switches between them as the narrative requires. They come together to form a new Lolita, one who is only Humbert's projection of the original, one who possesses only those qualities that he imposes on her and who shows no evolution beyond that which he allows. Lolita's primary structure, and the most persistently reductive, is that of the nymphet. Humbert claims that this category is not his creation but a specific natural quality to which he has assigned an intelligent name. It is well defined, although difficult to describe precisely, and pre-exists its members:Between the age limits of nine and fourteen, girls occur who, to certain bewitched travellers... reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymph (i.e. demonic); and I propose to call these chosen creatures "nymphets"... Within these age limits, are all little girls nymphets? Obviously not. Otherwise we who know, we solitary travellers, we nymphos, would have gone mad long ago. (16-17)This definition serves two complementary purposes. It dehumanizes the nymphet by making her foreign ("demonic"), and absolves the passionate admirer who is not in love, but "bewitched." Humbert can, and does, use this identity to justify his sexual urges towards Lolita. Remembering the restless hour spent wandering the Enchanted Hunters' hotel, waiting forLolita fell into a helpless and drugged sleep, Humbert confesses that he was gravely mistaken in supposing that Lolita was helpless and innocent: I should have understood... that the wicked water lily breathing from every pore of the fairy child I had prepared for my secret darling would make impossible secrecy and lethal delight. (124-125)Through this characterization, he places on Lolita not only responsibility for their first sexual encounter, but also for the suffering she would endure afterwards. She can do these things because she is more than human, because she is an "immortal demon disguised as a child" (138). The darkly sexual image of the nymphet is openly in conflict with another of Lolita's adopted identities: the reincarnation of Annabel Leigh. From his first meeting with Lolita, Humbert identifies her with his lost love: I find it very difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that thrill, that impact of passionate recognition. The moment my gaze slid over the kneeling little girl, bathed in sunlight… the void of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her luminous beauty, and I compared them to the features of my dead bride. (53)The weight of this image is much greater than it seems at first glance, because Annabel's identity is itself a complex and intricate tangle of meanings. By his own admission, he "remembers his features much less distinctly today than he did a few years ago." By calling her Annabel Leigh, Humbert both confines and expands her to fit Poe's mythical Annabel Lee, and many of his descriptions in fact contain direct references to the poem. When he meets Lolita he transfers this perfect image onto her, an artificial image that is all that remains of his first love, an image that now underlies both memories and thus creates them: My true liberation [from my obsession with Annabel ] had happened... in the moment, in fact, when Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, appeared to me, golden and brown, kneeling, looking up, on that shaded veranda... ( 167 )Here refers to Annabel Lee, not Annabel Leigh. Humbert cannot distinguish between the original child and the literary filter through which he remembers her. Likewise, the image he imposes on Lolita is crystalline, artificial, colored by visions of envious angels and a mythical realm. Over the course of the novel, Humbert's Lolita adopts countless other disguises. When overwhelmed by the desperation of his love or the dangerously unstable nature of his situation, Humbert refers to Lolita as his Carmen. The name first appears as the refrain of a folk song describing promiscuity, a song that Humbert transforms into a frenetically pompous poem about Lolita's absence. She evolves slowly, so much so that at the end of the novel she refers to the gypsy heroine of Merrimée's famous novella, another sometimes cruel and elusive creature. When she glimpses the signs of age in Lolita's face and manner, she makes her an echo of her mother, "Charlotte [rising] from her grave" (275). She can be a "simple child" (180) one moment and a "conspirator" the next (183). When, long after she has escaped him, he goes to visit her and her husband, the changes he sees in her make him uncomfortable. He finds an instant of peace only when she returns to a more familiar form, a form of his own making, when "for a moment strangely enough the only merciful and bearable one in the whole conversation [they] bristled at each other." 'other as if she were still [his]' (272). These contrasting images, the reverent and the bitter, the sacred and the profane, come together in a larger and more complex picture. Sometimes Lolita ascends to the most abstract forms: it becomes lonely..