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Madison Hill Dr. Joyce Stavick ENGL 3050 02 November 2017 A Glimpse into the Mind of a Sociopathic, Narcissistic Pedophile: A Syntactic Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Given how deplorable the narrator of his most renowned novel is, it is a true testament to Vladimir Nabokov’s stylistic brilliance that his literary work, Lolita , remains such a prominent work of literature over sixty years after its publication. Lolita is presented from the viewpoint of the pedophilic narrator, Humbert Humbert, and focuses on his obsession with a young girl, Eleanor, who he nicknames Lolita. In a series of wild plot turns, Humbert goes from living with the girl and her mother as a boarder to eventually absconding with Eleanor after her mother dies in a tragic accident, ultimately posing as her father while fulfilling his most disgusting desires. Eleanor eventually escapes with the help of another unsavory character who Humbert tracks down and kills by the end of the novel. Humbert Humbert is arguably one of the most unreliable, sociopathic, narcissistic narrators an author could concoct, so how is it that Lolita is so widely read and such a cultural phenomenon to this day? To answer that, one does not have to look farther than the style of the writing. Nabokov is able to command the English language and its conventions with such skill that he entrances readers, making them immerse themselves in a story that leaves them feeling horrified, but unable to detach from the story. Through various syntactic elements of the following quote, Nabokov not only exposes the narcissistic and sociopathic nature of his narrator, but also shows how he
forces readers to become invested in a story that leaves their skin practically crawling with disgust: My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. Beginning with the sheer length of the sentence, reaching an astounding ninety- nine words, Nabokov’s verbosity immediately indicates that the narrator is not being forthcoming with the true intent of the statement he is making. Making the reader’s brain run such a sentential marathon causes them to lose focus of the original meaning, Humbert’s very photogenic mother , and leads them to the subject Humbert views as the most important: himself. Since this passage appears early in the novel—the second chapter to be exact—it is one of the first glimpses the reader gets into the how narcissistic Humbert is. He cannot bear to have the reader’s attention shift to anything other than him and only mentions others if it serves his need of drawing the reader in or explains some facet of himself. He mentions his mother’s death only to evoke pity and uses the reference to his childhood to draw the reader into the recesses of his mind. His mother and her tragic death fail to exist in the reader’s mind by the time they reach the ninety-ninth word of the sentence.
bond between the narrator and reader through direct address because the relationship would not happen naturally given how unlikeable Humbert is. Additionally, Humbert’s need to forcibly create a bond with the reader reveals his need to be the focus of interest. Also harkening back to Humbert’s narcissism, Nabokov’s use of the colon, found roughly in the visual middle of the sentence, signals a definitive shift away from discussing the death of Humbert’s mother to Humbert luring the reader into a dreamscape of reminiscence. Directly following the colon, Humbert invites the reader to explore those redolent remnants of day suspended , giving an adult voice to childhood memories through rich imagery. By the end of the sentence, the original subject of the sentence, Humbert’s very photogenic mother , no longer lingers in the reader’s mind. Humbert cannot even discuss his mother’s death without sidetracking the reader, having them redirect their attention to the more important subject at hand: himself. The level of narcissism this sentence alone reveals is jarring and if not for Nabokov’s engaging style, leading the reader down an eloquently worded rabbit hole, they would likely be so put off by Humbert’s self-serving rambling, they would not read on. Throughout most of the sentence, Nabokov retains a high level of speech, following most conventions, giving Humbert an air of intelligence and authority. Humbert thrives on charisma and intellect as methods of controlling both the reader and other characters in the novel, so the use of a semicolon after the last independent clause of the sentence to separate it from two noun phrases, defying the conventional use of the semicolon to govern multiple independent clauses, seems out of place. In trying to establish the narrator as the person of great intelligence and charm, why would Nabokov choose to blatantly violate a punctuation rule? Arguably, the noun phrases that follow the semicolon act as a brief glimpse into a pattern of stream of consciousness
that would not typically be in complete sentences. The failure to adhere to conventional grammatical structure when the narrator is distressed or lost in thought reoccurs throughout the novel, usually appearing as fragments to indicate stream of consciousness. This breakdown shows the cracks in Humbert’s psyche, reminding the reader that they are trapped in the mind of a man who can only be classified as unstable and unwell. When unpacking this sentence syntactically, one thing that stood out was attempting to differentiate between prearticles and genitive prepositional phrases. While RK diagramming does not differentiate between the two, tree diagramming does so determining which it was quickly became a challenge as the sentence is dripping with both. The determining factor was which word in the phrase seemed most important for content. The most prominent examples of this conundrum were the phrase hollows and dells of memory and remnants of day suspended. In the case of the phrase, those redolent remnants of day suspended , remnants seems to carry more importance than day suspended as Humbert waxes on about the scraps of memories that seem to linger within his mind; thus, remnants of day is parsed into the noun remnants followed by the genitive preposition of day. The phrase hollows and dells of memory , however, poses a different situation where the key focus of the noun phrase is not the visual hollows and dells , but rather memory. Ultimately, hollows and dells of acts as a particularly verbose prearticle with memory as the head noun. The fact that this was such a prevalent point of confusion and debate reaffirms the idea that Nabokov was intentionally working towards a point of rambling to entrench the reader in Humbert’s mind, forcing them to grow closer to the story and the narrator spinning the tale. As
where they remain until the story is finished. Once again, readers are unwittingly guided into this narrator-reader relationship that they would not consciously form. In the context of the rest of the story and the disturbing inner machinations of Humbert’s mind, another interesting syntactic choice was Nabokov’s decision to use the adjectival noun freak to describe Humbert’s mother’s death—it seems wholly out of place given that the narrator could easily be described as freak himself. This is a man that openly lusts over a young girl, essentially kidnaps her at age twelve when her mother dies—a death he takes credit for despite it being an accident—and then molests her, and ultimately kills the man that helped her escape from him. Given how atypical his entire being is, qualifying anything as freak to him seems odd and must only be because of his age at the time of his mother’s death. Perhaps it was because of his age when it happened that he would consider it to be unordinary—it is important to remember that this is an adult voice portraying images from childhood—or perhaps Nabokov cleverly inserted this adjectival noun to try to make Humbert a more relatable character. Freak adds a layer of shocked emotion, despite Humbert being unable to feel that level of empathy because of his sociopathy. Sociopaths often learn how to connect with people for their gain and societal acceptance by mimicking how others show empathy. Given that he was so young when his mother died, the story he tells about her death most likely is influenced by others telling him about how she died—he would not have a clear memory of it. It is not branching too far to speculate that he is likely mimicking the examples of empathy he has witnessed from others and is using that mimicry to come across less sociopathic and to gain sympathy from the reader for the tragedy he experienced in the loss of his mother.
The concept of Humbert not being old enough to remember his mother’s death is further supported by Nabokov’s choice of the adjective photogenic to describe her. Perhaps he’s merely commenting on her beauty, but most likely it is far more significant of a descriptor because his only memories of her lie not true memory, but in photographs he grew up seeing when he was growing up. Since he has no memory of his mother and seems to have no real emotion about her death, revealed by his flippant tone evoked by (picnic, lightning) , his mentioning her only serves two purposes: to earn sympathy from the audience who would recognize the loss of one’s mother as traumatic and painful and to act as a gateway to entrench the reader deeper in the maze of his twisted psyche before they realize he has done so. Using tragedy for his own self-serving purposes reveals evil narcissistic and sociopathic characteristics. Overall, the sentence was indescribably challenging to unpack syntactically— arguably, an intentional action on Nabokov’s part—as it was difficult to even decipher where when clause ended and another began. The level of flow and readability despite the length of the sentence is a remarkable feat on Nabokov’s part and best demonstrates what a skilled narcissist Humbert is that he could seamlessly lead the reader from the death of his mother to his own childhood reminiscence before the reader realizes what he has done. Humbert will continue ensnaring readers through Nabokov’s skillful manipulation of syntax for decades, possibly centuries to come, because no narrator as loathsome as Humbert should be able enchant readers, but he does. Because of syntactic style alone, Lolita will never fall from shelves.
