MR: Most of the criticism I have encountered focuses on Humbert's "solipsizing" of Lolita. She has no subjectivity that we can access, since the Lolita we are given is, as Humbert says, "not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness--indeed, no life of her own" (62 AnL). Leland de la Durantaye, in his excellent, very readable book Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, does a great job unpacking all of the repercussions (for Humbert and for us) of this deeply flawed imaginative act. As he puts it, Humbert "can only 'enjoy in peace' his vicious circle of paradise if the real little girl he is do desperately mistreating does not too violently interpose herself--and so he decides to 'firmly ignore' her in favor of the 'phantasm' first formed on this fateful Sunday [the davenport scene]" ( 72-73). I do not think it is possible to know or to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be, though we know that she is not the girl Humbert gives himself and, by extension, us.

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