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Originally Posted by Billi
Of course, I'm mostly thinking of his feelings and thoughts with regard to Lolita but also of his attitude towards "the rest of the world". In my mind this is a little bit over-caricatured, his "love" of the little girls and his arrogance and disgust towards almost all of the other persons.
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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
I found Humbert's contempt for everyone else quite believable too. If you believe you have the right to do something that is condemned by society, you would have to hold that society in contempt, or it would be much harder to justify your actions to yourself.
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Originally Posted by caleb72
OK - I tend to think that Humbert was not a particularly handsome man. Actually I felt that his unreliability as narrator extended to his perception of his appearance. At a couple of places he references the rather large size of his organ - which gave me a hint that his perception of himself was possibly "generous".
Compare his descriptions of himself versus his description of C.Q. and his "friend" Gaston, both paedophiles in ways only slightly different from himself. What a happy juxtaposition he creates of himself against these fat, hideous creatures; his noble bearing, his supreme intelligence. I would not be surprised to find out that he was not half the creature he pretended and his warped self-perception extended to his appearance.
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I think Caleb might be on to something there. We get the scene at the end, where drunken, dishevelled and dirty Humbert scares the young girl; his inner depravity finally manifested. And certainly Dolly found Quilty to be the stuff of adolescent imaginings, when we remember the magazine ad pinned over her bed.
It's perhaps too obvious to think there's an element of cultured European vs. crass Americans to explain Humbert's loftiness; just the same.... Especially in Nabokov's treatment of Charlotte (charlatan?) and her pretensions and artiness. However, Nabokov made a point of having Gaston and the Russian cabbie subject to the same contempt, so it's not a simple case of European superior, American inferior.