s 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.'" Humbert says that he is aware of the reader's desire as a voyeur, and he thinks he can depend on it for freedom from prejudice. Humbert the narrator is aware that the scene he is about to replay is going to hurt many readers' feeling and offend their moral sense, so he dissociates himself as a somewhat grotesque theatrical character: "Main character: Humbert the Hummer." Lolita, too is portrayed as vulgar; " she wore a pretty pink dress that I had seen on her once before . . . and, to compliment the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden- red apple. The three adjectives used by Humbert to describe the apple, which is objectively beautiful, artistically vulgar and superfluous in this context, but appropriate and functional in this scene. Lolita is no longer a vulgar little flirt, but the archetypal temptress and seductress. Humbert the protagonist, burlesqued by Humbert the narrator, is too excited sexually to be distracted by such clichs.The apple serves as a prop in a first erotic exchange: Lolita tosses it up as if she was juggling with it, he catches it, and she begs him to give it back: "I produce Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under crimson skin." "Delicious" does not only refer to the apple, but, metaphorically, the penis, which in the present scene will be turned into a poetic object. The scene becomes more predictable as Humbert's excitement increases: "Sitting there on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless lim...
