"I failed to mention that Humbert Humbert's "Quilty" may be a figment of his imagination, one which he creates to represent in his eyes (as characters are usually able to think, imagine, hallucinate...) his sensation of being chased by "a fiend". Nabokov is not the repulsive Quilty, as I seemed to have implied, but he is certainly HH's fiend (rather unlike the corrupt evil Clare Quilty of HH's hallucinations)."
RSGwynn: If one accepts that CQ may be merely a figment of HH's imagination, why not go whole hog and assume that all of the events of the novel, which we know only from the pov of the perhaps less than reliable first-person narrator, are part of the delusion? Why not just assume that Lolita herself is the hallucination of a mad pedophile? There's no way to disprove this theoretical reading, of course, just as there is no way to "prove" that HH has some kind of "reality," given the usual conventions of the novel. I think of Krug in BS in this regard, who the author ("VN") constantly reminds us is nothing more that a fictional character subject to the god-like author's "whims and megrims." But Lolita, as a first-person narrative, does not allow this degree of authorial intrusion (though surely it is there, in a subtler way); we are stuck with Humbert's version of events, unreliable or not, though we do know that he "confesses" his absolute inability to know Lo's mind. My feeling is that we should trust (more or less) the "truth" of his confession. If we believe that his narration is no more than an inventive trope, a mere literary conceit orchestrated by VN, then the whole novel dissolves into the irrelevance of a madman's fantasy life and an author's playing tricks on us that we have failed to comprehend.
RSG
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