Humbert Humbert's contrition concerning the damage he inflicted on Lolita seems to be sincere [unlike Austrian Josef Fritzl's boast in the media that, since he might have killed abused daughter and grandchildren unbeknownst to the police, but he didn't, this proves "he is no monster". In many countries pedophiles are not severly punished: a few years in prison, at most].
HH's self-condemnation, though, is not totally unambiguous in his lithophanic sentence.

This is an understatement. Isn't the whole point, the sine qua non, of "Lolita" that the good reader should not -- will not -- be seduced by HH's fake rhetoric? A sincerely repentant man would commit that foul murder, a charge which he thinks the jury should dismiss? A sincerely repentant man would justify that murder with that fatuous fake-Ash Wednesday poem? CQ has to die because of HH's "inner essential innocence"? If that quasi-insight with the tinkling sounds and children's voices had been more than fleeting, how could HH continue to justify to the jury that he did his best to give Lolita a "good time" while every sentence reveals, comically if it weren't so awful, how foully he treated her? When VN rebukes his interviewer, saying HH is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching, surely that is the moral of the novel: that the reader is so easily taken in although the truth is staring him in the face. And VN's judgement is nuanced. HH will be allowed one evening a year on that green path, unlike Hermann (see Preface to "Despair"). This is not a moral "in tow"; the book is its own moral.

 

Anthony Stadlen