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I almost feel like an argument could be made that this book was an attack on:
- the education system for failing our youth (Gaston and that ridiculous headmistress)
- academia for being able to so easily delude itself and justify all sorts of horrible actions in the name of some lofty and absurd ideal (Humbert)
- culture for treating youth like prey (C. Q.)
And then a massive broadside on the rest of society at the time for holding such institutions so sacred as to ignore the wanton destruction of children right under its proverbial nose.
I find it very telling that Humbert did not get arrested for being a paedophile, only for murdering another disgusting individual (another held up as respectable by society). I can't help feeling the author had a specific reason for this. Throughout the novel I expected him to finally slip up and get caught - and he never did.
Maybe the reason the murder scene itself was slapstick (even the escape of Lolita was farcical) was that Nabokov was telling us that these are insignificant events despite their apparent drama. We should remain focused on the child and what was done to her. And it may even be possible to replace 'child' with 'generation'.
I'm drawing with a very long bow today, but this idea won't go away. I don't know enough about which actual society and time that Nabokov might have been commenting on to suggest that this idea has legs - but that's no reason it can't generate some extra discussion with my learned friends.
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