Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Here is another thought that occurred to me that I wonder if anyone else feels the same way. To me the scene where Humbert murders Quilty stuck out like a sore thumb relative to the rest of the book. It was just so absurdly comic. Larry murders Moe; Curly was not in the scene. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. What do there rest of you think?
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The "murder" of Quilty does have a surreal comedic element. Throughout the novel Nabokov seems to play with genres--usually ironically. {I now think that perhaps the references to Poe are part of this ironic use of literary iconography.} Here the motif is the "avenging angel". Humbert sees the murder as punishment and revenge. It is really one monster killing another even more horrible monster. Evil is essentially and ultimately nonsense--thus we have the utterly cartoonish effect of what the participants themselves regard as something serious.
But in another sense the scene has a serious dimension. The comedic--as in
Dr Strangelove, and indeed much satire--can be dark and deeply pessimistic. Nabokov is dramatizing the tension between an emergent but flawed morality and nihilism. Quilty is the latter. Humbert--in however limited a fashion--is beginning to develop a conscience. It is all surreal comedy on one level. On another it is an elemental dualistic moral clash.
One of the most rewarding aspects of
Lolita is that it allows an enormous range of interpretive freedom and there are all kinds of valid ways of seeing this book. It has certainly justified the validity of being considered significant Literature.
Personally, I think it is a masterpiece but very difficult and uncomfortable to read on an emotional level.