According to John Ray, Jr. (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Humbert Humbert had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start:
According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955), had he not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr, one of the parts of his book might be called “Dolorés Disparue:”
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert's poem "Wanted" (composed in a madhouse near Quebec after Lolita was abducted from him) ends in the line "And the rest is rust and stardust" (an allusion to Hamlet's last words in Shakespeare's Hamlet, 5.2: "The rest is silence"):
Describing his first visit to the Haze house in Ramsdale, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest:
Describing his life with Lolita at Beardsley (a small University town in New England), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions powerful binoculars:
During her second road trip with Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) across the USA, Lolita falls ill in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains) and is hospitalized on Tuesday, June 28, 1949:
Describing the murder of Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck:
The narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert would have never met Lolita, if on the eve the fire had not destroyed McCoo's house:
In VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert is afraid that his wife Charlotte will bundle off Lolita to St. Algebra:
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake - not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
Describing his first physical contact with Lolita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the brink of a voluptuous abyss: