Humbert’s Fantasy And Reality:Parody Of Fairy Tales In Lolita

Lolita is acknowledged as Nabokov’s most widely-spread and widely-recognized novel. It receives enormous criticism since publication. The thesis studies the controversial character-Humbert’s psychological conditions through analysis of the parody of fairy tales in the novel, which is a tentative step to probe into the hero’s psychology through stylistic studies.Humbert’s psychological development experiences three stages with the waxing and waning of the fantastic and realistic world in his mind. The thesis therefore follows Humbert’s psychological transformation and consists of three parts. The first chapter deals with how Humbert constructs his wonderland, how he restrains his fantasy and how the diminutive romance is disturbed by the cold reality. Haunted by the unfulfilled love in his childhood, Humbert constructs his own fairyland to get rid of the agony of his desire for nymphets and to live in the past. Humbert, as a matter of fact, is a solipsist trapped in his own obsession of timelessness, while Lolita is regarded by him as an exit of his incestuous lust and a means to escape the imprisonment of time. He tries to confine Lolita in the enchanted island, but with taboos and conventional norms often intruding in his fantasy, Humbert can only restrain his desire. The second part elaborates Humbert’s mental conditions between the gap of heaven and hell. After the removal of the biggest obstacle-Charlotte, Humbert cannot control his desire any longer. Taking advantage of the orphan’s helplessness, Humbert enjoys the ecstasy of his freed fantasy but at the same time suffers from the reflection of horrible reality. His oscillating between fantasy and reality is showed by the sudden transformation from fairy tales to horror stories and the ubiquitous mirror images which reflect both what Humbert desires and the effect of his desire. Every time he looks into the mirror, he sees his evil self, he sees the helpless girl and he sees his own crime. The last chapter probes into Humbert’s transcendence of his fantasy and the realization of his crime after returning to the reality. Finally Humbert’s obsession is transcended after the murdering of his Double-Quilty onto whom Humbert tries to transfer the responsibility of his perverted conducts. Quilty’s death also means the collapse of the fantastic world for he constitutes a co-tenant in the wonderland. Humbert steps out of his fantasy to find that he himself is only an ogre-father who regards his step-daughter as an obsessing object and who has totally ruined the little girl’s childhood. But when he starts from the end to write the novel as the narrator Humbert, Lolita constitutes a representation of his aesthetic quest to spring into the deep emotion of obsession and to express his attempt to pursue immortality.Through the analysis of Nabokov’s parody of fairy tales in Lolita, the thesis goes into the fantastic world created by Humbert, demonstrates how the fairy tales metamorphoses into horror stories, and uncovers Humbert’s trick of taking Quilty as his Double to shoulder the responsibility of his crime so as to penetrate into Humbert’s inner world where his fantasy and physical reality collides. Furthermore, the intermittent fairy tale allusions in the novel bring to readers a fantastic-and-realistic experience that resembles Humbert’s. Humbert’s obsession of timelessness is transcended and the immortality of Lolita is reserved.