bs." The poetic escalation accompanying Humbert's increasing excitement continues in the following lines, and his "masked lust" becomes "the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion." In this once metaphorical phrase, a word reappears that was used in the passage earlier, "passion." The subtlety and the intensity of his excitement, added to the poetic prowess of his narrator double, have brought about this change. Step by step, Humbert the narrator redeems Humbert the protagonist and eventually becomes one with him at the end, so it becomes terribly difficult to distinguish each participant's contribution in the construction of this scene. At the moment of climax, the narrator vanishes behind his protagonist self who addresses the members of the jury as follows: "and my moaning mouth . . . almost reached the back of her neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known." Later on, he will be very hard on himself; here, though, he neither accuses himself nor makes amends but glorifies his sexual experience which he claims had no precedent in nature and therefore cannot be judged in any human court of law. The word "monster" probably does not imply that Humber the narrator is beginning to feel remorse but rather that Humbert the protagonist feels as if he has totally freed himself from the laws of men and has performed the ultimate erotic act. To be sure, Humbert tries to vindicate himself morally after that: "I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor."The author gets personally involved in the construction of this scene: his writing seeks to transmute Humbert's erotic experience into a work of art, and to induce us to relive it intensely in our imaginations. He does not want us to simply to identify with its protagonist as a crude pornographer would, but to adhere totally to this beautiful text in which the gradual e...
