Lolita For His Actions example essay topic

Sexual Desire plays a large part in the novel. After Humbert loses his first love Annabelle at age fourteen to typhus, he longs for the memory of her, particularly the fact that Humbert never completed the sexual act with her. This brings us to the Lolita syndrome. Lolita quickly sparks memories of Annabelle and the feelings he once had for her. Humbert has strong sexual cravings from the moment he lays eyes on Lolita. Humbert disguises himself reading a book or tanning himself while actually watching Lolitas every move.

Humbert finds reasons to walk by her room, or to collide into her. In these moments, he said, I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. When Lolitas mother decides to send her to summer camp, Humbert becomes so frantic, plots form in his mind about ways to rid Charlotte. Throughout the book Humbert casts the blame (for his actions) on everyone and everything but himself. This is a good tactic he uses because the reader rationalizes many of the events by blaming them on the same things that he blamed. One of the first things that he blames is his supposedly tortured past.

He tells the story of he had a childhood fixation with a girl child and how they were madly in love and then she died. He goes on to say how her loss traumatized him and led to his obsession with young girls, he says there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain girl child. In a princedom by the sea (9). He goes on later to say All I want to stress is that my discovery of Lolita was a fatal consequence of that princedom by the sea in my tortured past (40). Humbert uses his past as an excuse by portraying the feeling that he somehow cannot help himself he makes it seem like he has some kind of disorder.

Using this argument the reader comes to believe that he sick so he can't really be held responsible for his actions. As the events unfold and his actions get progressively worse it seems to the reader that he can't help himself so the reader rather excuses him and his actions. Another thing that Humbert blames in order to get the reader to sympathize with him is society. He tries to say that the fact that he has sex with a little girl is only wrong by the standards set by the society that he lives in. He says, I found myself maturing amid a civilization, which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not of twelve (20).

His idea is that if two people are in love it shouldn't matter how old they are, they should be able to do what they want. He also makes the point that this is accepted in other societies, he says, Marriage and cohabitation before puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lep cha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight and no body minds (19). According to him he is not a sick pervert or criminal he is merely a victim of society's strict standards and conventions.

He gets the reader to sympathize with him by playing this true love vs. an oppressive society angle because many people find themselves seeing his actions merely as him standing up for his beliefs and not letting society oppress him. Finally and most importantly he blames Lolita for his actions. He makes it seem that he was a nave victim and that it was her controlling him all along. Fist of all there is theory about how Lolita is not really a child but a nymphet, he says (about nymphets), they reveal their true nature which is not human but nymph ic (that is demonic) (16). He then says about Lolita after having sex with her for the first time that her body was the body of some immortal demon disguised as a child (139). He tries to make it seem like it is she who sucks him in and forces him to do all those things to her.

He even says that the first time that they had sex was not because of desire on the part of him but because Lolita seduced him into it. He also makes it seem that while he was nervous and unsure Lolita was the pushy kid who had had sex many times before. He basically defames her throughout the book therefore making him and his actions more acceptable in the ideas of the reader..