What I meant to say was that the perhaps too glamorous Clare Quilty does not exist, except in Humbert's false or perhaps better say pseudo confession. I am suggesting that, just as in Pale Fire the perhaps too glamorous Charles Kinbote is an aspect of Shade and has no independant existence, Ivor (the dentist) Quilty, is the the only Quilty, and therefore the only pedophile who molests Lolita. Clare Quilty, like Vivian Darkbloom, is then a figment of Humbert's guilt-ridden imagination. In this new interpretation, Humbert's guilt is the result of his failure to protect Lolita from Ivor Quilty.

Then I further ask -- if indeed Humbert is only one Humbert and Quilty is only one Quilty then ... what? 

You must understand that I am asking these questions in a speculative (mirroring?) sort of mood. Can't I then further ask, if Nabokov could create a first-person pedophile narrator without himself being a pedophile then, as worlds regress, could it not also be that his creation has himself created a first person pedophile narrator of a fiction entitled Confessions of a White Widowed Male. Speculatively speaking, of course. 

Jansy recently brought to our attention Don Johnson's Worlds in Regression, the title of which I seem to recall refers to VN's image of his works as paintings hanging somewhere in the ether for the viewer to contemplate - outside of time as it were. I have been attempting to do this, to put aside detailed analyses and close readings, and simply contemplate what I know of this and other works by Nabokov, and wonder if we haven't missed something.

Carolyn