My apologies for mis-identifying your comment as Mary's. Allow me to restate that your comment about HH feeling remorse only when he stops seeing her as a nymphet is very perceptive. I don't think that it is simply a matter of opinion what traits are in HH's character. An author attempts to create a believable character. If the reader is jarred into thinking that the character has just stepped out of character, the author has tripped up. So the question legitimately can be asked whether HH's behavioral response to finding the non-nymphet Lolita is believable--if it is in character, that is. The author has to build up to it. If HH had been showing some remorse up to that point, his compassion in that scene is more believable. I suppose I'm reading from some of the comments that the commentators do not believe in his sudden remorse. If the behavior does not seem to fit the character, then the plot seems staged, hence my deus ex machina comment. I, for one, did find believable HH's remorse in the scene in Lolita's house. But that could be because I wished it to be so. Your comment linking his remorse to his no longer seeing her as a nymphet made me reconsider. if a true pedophile stops seeing his prey as alluring, it seems to me that he loses all interest all together and moves on to another underage victim. Since HH reacted with compassion, it seems he was created less a pedophile and more as a person in love with the particular person. Thus it seems HH is not a pedophile at all, in the psychological sense, even though he had sexual relations with this twelve year old. What he does in fantasy is not the same as what is done in practice. Perhaps he's not a pedophile but rather obsessive.

JM to Frances Assa: Are you addressing Mary's comments to my posting? Because the lines you quoted [ HH feeling remorse only when he stops seeing her as a nymphet], were laboriously written by me. And this is why I'll take the liberty to reply with two other queries: Isn't it a matter of opinion (which may vary ad infinitum) if this or that trait is in the character of HH - when you offered almost no arguments in support of your view? What other deus ex machina, if not Nabokov, determines HH's putative remorse?

One of my previous comments is in need of a correction. I wrote that I didn't believe that Humbert Humbert was able to distinguish simple traffic rules from human law. I'm not so sure now after I came across the following statement: "all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic" It's clear that here he is mentioning traffic conventions, signals and rules - not the law.

However the insertion of "cutting across all human rules..." implies in the notion of a "transgression," and he'll take up this image later on, when he writes:"[... ] I was all covered with Quilty — with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me — not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience — that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good."

Humbert Humbert seems to mock a divine law. I argued before that HH believes that he can reign supreme above good and evil (as a Nietzschean touch), but now I need to rconsider this idea. Dostoievsky's works were mentioned during this discussion. His widely quoted sentence, in "The Brothers Karakazov" ("If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted"), couldn't fail to impress me in the present context. I'm almost certain that HH's mangling human law is related, perhaps deliberately so, to Dostoievsky's literary proposition. When HH writes about "traffic rules" and "straight and winding roads that cut across each other" this may be offering an unexplored link to his trespassings.

Jansy Mello