of killing Charlotte himself, if only he were able to commit the perfect murder. With this in mind, the fact that Charlotte was killed in a completely random accident shows that some force of nature (a god as Homer would express it) favored Humbert and thus helped him in the path of his odyssey. Homer would, because of this incident, consider Humbert Humbert to some degree a heroic character. In Homer’s commentary on Lolita he would next discuss the similarities between his own writing style and the writing style of Humbert Humbert. Homer, in my opinion, would suggest that if Lolita was written in the same time period that he wrote the Odyssey, Lolita would have been an epic poem. Humbert describes his own odyssey in full detail, throughout the course of the book, in the same fashion as Homer. They both describe their leading characters’ tribulations with the same immense detail. Homer achieves this through writing in verse while Humbert’s writings are in prose. Many of Humbert’s passages, as would be noted by Homer, are written in a very poetic form, suggesting an epic poem type feel. Homer would go on to make comparisons to the manner in which he and Humbert Humbert refer to their characters. For example, Homer, when speaking of Odysseus, almost always follows his name with a description such as, “Odysseus, master mariner and soldier”(X, 540) and, “Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways”(X, 559). Humbert Humbert in his narrative calls himself many variations of his name, such as, “Humbert the Hummer”(Nabokov, 57) and “Humbert the Cubus”(Nabokov, 71). In the same manner that Humbert plays with his own name, he is constantly varying Lolita’s name. Even though this may be a trivial similarity, I believe that Homer would consider this use of language a major tie between his writings and the writings of Humbert Humbert. Through an intense stud...
