The Many Personalities of Lolita and Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita Essay

The Many Personalities of Lolita and Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita Although they are intimately involved, the title character of Nabokov's Lolita never fully reveals her true self to Humbert. Likewise, Humbert pours his physical love into Lolita, but he never reveals to his stepdaughter a self that is separate from his obsession with her. These two characters mask large parts of their personalities from each other and the rest of the world, creating different images and personas in regard to different people and situations. One assumption of post-structuralism holds that â€Å"persons are culturally and discursively structured, created in interaction as situated, symbolic beings.† In accordance with this idea that people are created by their culture and in their interactions, both Lolita and Humbert have different personalities in different situations and circumstances. However, they ultimately show a more continuous and profound self-existence than just as faces created in their various interactions. Post-structuralism is a theory containing a wide array of ideas concerning meaning, reality, and identity. Post-structuralism believes that the mind receives â€Å"impressions from without which it sifts and organizes into a knowledge of the world† which is expressed in language, or symbols (Selden, Widdowson 128). The â€Å"subject,† or person, â€Å"grasps the object and puts it into words†(128). Knowledge is formed from various types of communication which â€Å"pre-exist the subject’s experiences,† the subject existing as a being that is â€Å"not an autonomous or unified identity, but is always ‘in process’†(129). There are many assumptions of post-structuralism, but only one will be focused on here, in terms of Lolita and Humbert. This assumpti... ...s of Lolita and Humbert to show the isolation and loneliness they feel, and to show just how different and immoral the situation is. By stressing the dissonance between one persona to the next, he portrays a view of his characters that is sad and shocking, for the public seen is also the reader; the unaware, innocent, â€Å"moral† group. By letting us into the different faces of Lolita and Humbert, Nabokov reveals the tragedy in the novel, and allows the reader to vividly feel what is morally right and wrong with Humbert, Lolita, and ourselves. Works Cited Lye, John. Some Post-Structural Assumptions. 1997. 5-2001. http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.html. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Random, 1997. Selden, Raman, and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide To Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993.