l desires. (57-61) Despite the highly poetic language Humbert uses to mask the magnitude of his interdict desires, and make the reader sympathetic, the narrator realizes that his sexual hunger for nymphets is not moral in the eyes of society. Here, the narrator takes endless precautions, begging us to sympathize with him as a protagonist and to participate in the scene: “I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, ‘impartial sympathy.” This is a somewhat ambiguous request: Humbert the narrator says that he is aware of the reader’s desire as a voyeur, and he thinks he can depend on his freedom from prejudice, nay on his erotic complicity. The signs of embarrassment and self-censorship are obvious here; yet, it is neither the author, nor even the protagonist who is supposed to experience such feelings, but the narrator while he is writing and imagining his reader’s reactions. Naturally, there is a big difference between this sexual scene between a thirty-seven-year-old man and a twelve-year-old girl, and the sexual games indulged in by young and inexperienced Humbert and Annabel Leigh on the French Riviera. Humbert the narrator is aware that the scene he is about to replay is going to hurt many readers’ feelings and offend their moral sense, so he dissociates himself from Humbert the protagonist by presenting him as a somewhat grotesque theatrical character: “Main character: Humbert the Hummer.” The dissociation of Humbert the narrator from Humbert the protagonist is another verbal allusion to innocence in spite of his sexual deviancy.Humbert portrays Lolita in a somewhat vulgar fashion in this particular scene in order to establish the unoffensiveness of his behavior. ...
